The National Music Producers' Association (NMPA) filed a lawsuit against Roblox Corporation for alleged copyright infringement. As reported by Variety, NMPA CEO David Israelite announced the lawsuit during the association's 2021 annual meeting. Israelite claims that Roblox has taken advantage of children's ignorance of copyright law to allow copyrighted music on their platform. The company charges players for uploading music files into the game, earning millions from copyrighted music being uploaded onto their platform. This wouldn't have been a problem, but Roblox doesn't pay for any licenses or royalties to the artists. The company also doesn't do anything to police the content being uploaded onto their platform, hence allowing copyrighted material to be uploaded all the time.
NMPA claims that players of the game have uploaded popular songs by the likes of deadmau5, Ariana Grande, and Imagine Dragons. Hence, the NMPA represents various record labels in the lawsuit. The lawsuit aims to have Roblox pay $200 million in damages.
Meanwhile, it's not just Roblox that is being put under the spotlight by the NMPA. The association of music publishers also said they are pursuing Twitch for the use of copyrighted music by their users on their platform. NMPA claims that Twitch has continuously failed to license music on its platform. Israelite said that NMPA has increased their efforts in issuing DMCA takedown requests on VODs they deem using unlicensed copyrighted music. This explains the increased amount of DMCA takedown requests received by players over the past month.
As for Roblox, the video game company, which went public earlier this year, has announced that they will be responding to this lawsuit and try to find an amicable solution for music artists. The company says that they do not tolerate copyright infringement on their platform.
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