X Corp and the major music publishers ended their three-year music-licensing legal war, filing joint stipulations to dismiss both the publishers’ copyright suit and X’s antitrust countersuit with prejudice. Publishers led by Sony, Universal, and Warner Chappell had sued in June 2023 seeking more than $250M over roughly 1,700 works, while X countersued in January accusing them of colluding through the NMPA to force industrywide licenses at inflated rates. Neither filing discloses settlement terms or whether X will now license music, and the truce follows a March Supreme Court ruling for Cox Communications that weakened the publishers’ lone surviving infringement theory.
