Roblox is being sued by The National Music Publishers’ Association for $200 Million for using copyrighted music without the proper permission. The songs in question are by artists such as Ariana Grande, Imagine Dragons, deadmau5, Ed Sheeran and the Rolling Stones.
As reported by Variety, the NMPA announced the lawsuit against Roblox during the trade group’s 2021 annual meeting. NMPA CEO David Israelite claimed that Roblox has garnered a massive player base of 42 million active daily players and that the company has actively avoided paying music creators.
Isrealite said that Roblox has raked in, “hundreds of millions of dollars by requiring users to pay every time they upload music onto the platform — taking advantage of young people’s lack of understanding about copyright — and then they take virtually no action to prevent repeat infringement or alert users to the risks they are taking.”
The lawsuit was filed by the NMPA on behalf of a number of publishers, including ABKCO Music & Records, Big Machine Records, Concord Music Group with Pulse Music Group, deadmau5 (Joel Zimmerman), Downtown Music Publishing, Hipgnosis, Kobalt Music Group, MPL Music Publishing, Peermusic, Reservoir Media Management, Spirit Music Group and UMPG.
The trade group’s statement has mentioned that the lawsuit seeks monetary compensation for “Roblox’s unabashed exploitation of music without proper licenses.” Additionally, it claims that the suit “will ensure songwriters are fully paid for their works on the platform and that Roblox takes seriously its obligations to those who have made its service so popular and profitable.”
Isrealite went on to call out Twitch for its own ongoing copyright music issues. He claimed that the NMPA will continue with its copyright-takedown spree as Amazon refuses to pay for the music. He mentioned an “intensive enforcement program to ID and remove unlicensed songs from [Twitch]”.
In a financial call last month, Roblox Corporation CEO David Baszucki discussed the possibility of the game coming to PlayStation and Switch. "So absolutely long-term, Switch, PlayStation, Quest- all of these platforms make perfect sense for Roblox. What you’re seeing right now is an incredible focus on the phone by us, which we believe is an incredibly difficult form factor and the most difficult form factor for that immersion, but these are all logical platforms and at the same time, we won’t share any ship dates for them".