Wixen Music Publishing has recently pulled short-form video-sharing app Triller into the court alleging copyright infringement on more than 1,000 songs. It is asking for $50 million from Triller as damages.

Triller’s app works similar to the app of TikTok. It also allows users to create and share short videos typically including music. Wixen is known for administering more than 50,000 songs which are written and owned by more than 2,000 clients of Wixen. Its clients include Tom Petty, Neil Young, and Missy Elliott among them. 

Many criticized Triller for its ignorance of not acting on the need to legitimize fully license the songs of members of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA). David Israelite was the first person to criticize Triller on this fact. He is the president and CEO of the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA). After him, a trade group also criticized it for the same. Wixen belongs to this Trafe Group. However, initially, Triller’s CEO appeared to agree on legitimizing fully the license to which the company was encouraged fully. But later no agreement was reached. Thus, Wixen decided to file this lawsuit.

Wixen filed 15 pages long federal complaint in the U.S. Central District of California Western Division. Claims which Wixen made on Triller are as follows:

  • Triller has been willfully infringing its musical compositions as they are being used in the app without the proper licenses.
  • Triller allowed its users to include its music compositions in videos without authorization or compensation.
  • Triller has brazenly disregarded copyright law and committed willful and ongoing copyright infringement.
  • Triller was well aware that it needed to negotiate licenses with Wixen and other publishers to use those works but it didn’t do so.
  • Instead of paying Wixen and the songwriters to which Wixen represents for the purpose of using their Works, Triller pays ‘social influencers’ substantial sums of money and provides them with Rolls Royces, mansions (with housekeeping), weekly sushi dinners at Nobu, and, in at least one instance, a helicopter.

“Triller could have reached out and negotiated with Wixen to obtain the necessary licenses, as its CEO promised,” states the company representative. He also added, “Instead, it chose to brazenly disregard copyright law and commit willful and ongoing copyright infringement. Among the evidence of Triller’s wilfulness is that it continued to use, copy, and exploit the Works even after Wixen notified Triller that it had not obtained the proper licenses for the use of the works?”

“We tried to engage with them, but nothing they said or did convince us that they were serious about rectifying their infringements," Wixen founder Randall Wixen tells Billboard via email. "At one point they told us that fewer than five of our clients’ songs were on their service, and we had already found hundreds of them. How could they not know what songs were on their own platform or who controlled those songs? If they didn’t know that, they shouldn’t have been on Triller in the first place."

Triller’s CEO Mike Lu though firmly disputes those allegations saying, “Wixen is an ambulance-chasing company set up purely to shake down people and companies in a statement to Billboard.

“Triller has already pulled down the two songs in question which were put up by users, not Triller,” says Lu in the statement. “This is nothing but a baseless shakedown and it won’t work. We look forward to our day in court where hopefully we can stop them from doing this to others who may not have the resources to fight them and give in to their extortionist demands. Instead of taking the easy route and paying their extortion, we are fighting this for all those who cannot afford to do so, to help stop these things from happening in our business. It ends here and stops now."

Wixen demands a jury trial and seeks the maximum statutory relief claiming that it is entitled to the amount of about $150,000 per work infringed which means the sum of at least $50.4 million.

Triller managed to raise about $37.5 million to date including a $28 million Series B round last year to fuel growth aimed at overtaking TikTok. Snoop Dogg, The Weekend, Marshmello, and Lil Wayne are all promoted as investors, and it has licensing deals in place with the big three major labels, Universal Music Group, Sony Music, and Warner Music Group. In early August the app reported 65 million monthly active users and then in September said it had reached 100 million milestones. But the same figure was contested by former employees where he claimed that the company had inflated its reach. It is also grown significantly in India during the period where TikTok and other Chinese-owned apps were banned.

Wixen also filed similar lawsuit of about $1.6 billion against Spotify ahead of the company's initial public offering. Wixen alleged that Spotify used tens of thousands of songs without a proper license of Wixen’sand without even compensating it. However, that lawsuit was privately settled in December 2018.

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