Background
Epidemic Sound is a Swedish music licensing company that provides a vast library of royalty-free music tracks to content creators—YouTubers, podcasters, and social media influencers who license its catalog to soundtrack their videos. The company sued Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) in 2025, alleging that Meta made Epidemic Sound’s copyrighted audio content available to billions of social media users on its platforms without authorization, infringing the company’s exclusive rights to reproduce and distribute its works.
The suit raised a question that has become increasingly common as social media platforms build and expand their in-app audio libraries: when a platform makes user-uploaded content—including soundtracks—accessible to others, and some of that audio may match a licensed catalog, at what point does the platform’s conduct constitute direct or indirect copyright infringement?
The Court’s Holding
Judge Corley granted Meta’s motion to dismiss, finding that Epidemic Sound had failed to plausibly allege “substantial similarity” between its copyrighted works and the specific content that Meta made available. Substantial similarity is a required element of a copyright infringement claim—a plaintiff must show not only that its works were copied, but that the resulting reproduction is substantially similar to the protected expression in the original.
The complaint was deficient because Epidemic Sound did not identify which of its protected works corresponded to which allegedly infringing content on Meta’s platforms, and did not provide a factual basis from which the court could plausibly infer that protected expression—as opposed to unprotectable elements like tempo, key, or genre conventions—was reproduced. A high-level allegation that Meta distributed “Epidemic Sound’s audio content” without license, without identifying specific works and specific infringing copies, is too conclusory to survive dismissal under the Twombly/Iqbal pleading standard.
Key Takeaways
- Copyright plaintiffs must identify specific protected works and plausibly allege that specific infringing copies are substantially similar—a broad allegation that a platform hosts unlicensed versions of a catalog is insufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.
- The substantial similarity requirement applies at the pleading stage, not just at trial; conclusory assertions of infringement without a factual basis for the similarity finding will be dismissed.
- Music licensing companies pursuing platform infringement claims must map their protected works to specific platform content, a time-consuming but necessary step before filing.
- This decision reinforces the pleading-stage gatekeeping role that substantial similarity analysis plays in copyright cases against large platforms.
Why It Matters
As social media platforms integrate ever-larger in-app audio libraries to compete with each other and with music-streaming services, music rights holders are intensifying enforcement efforts. This ruling sends a clear signal about what it takes to get a copyright complaint past the pleading stage: specificity matters. Identifying that a Swedish library company’s works were broadly “made available” on Meta’s platforms is not enough—plaintiffs must do the harder work of tying specific tracks to specific infringing uses before the litigation can proceed.
For platforms, the decision offers some protection against sweeping copyright complaints that allege infringement across a catalog without identifying discrete acts. For rights holders, it is a reminder that volume of infringement, if true, does not substitute for the specific work-by-work identification that copyright law requires.
Surfaced via Law360 IP.