Under the DMCA, copyright owners can ask Twitter to remove any material that infringes on copyrighted works. But why was the minister’s account temporarily locked? Did Twitter have any other choice? IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Friday was stopped from posting content on Twitter for an hour because he posted content with a copyrighted song in 2017. Now, the organisation that filed the copyright notice which eventually led to Prasad's brief deplatforming, has defended the notice, saying that Twitter users don't have the rights to post Sony Music content without a license, the Economic Times reported. We have reached out to Twitter for comment. The tweet his account was locked for was reported by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry on behalf of Sony Music Entertainment, the latter being one of the three big music labels. Strangely enough, Prasad's tweet, which used the 1997 AR Rahman song Maa Tujhe Salaam, was the only one cited by the copyright infringement notice filed by the IFPI under the US's Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 2000. It was sent by the IFPI on May 24, a month before Twitter acted on the notice, according to a copy of the notice that MediaNama found and accessed on the Lumen Database, where the social media platform discloses copyright and government takedown requests. Why an Indian minister's tweet was taken down by a US law The DMCA is one of the most common sources of content takedowns on the internet — it enjoys global power…
