satirical publication that is known in the media under the name The Onion, has won a bankruptcy auction this month, allowing them to purchase Info Wars,
Alex Jones’ website, a conspiracy theorist website. In the bankruptcy auction, they also received permission to buy other related assets. Yet, the purchase of those entities is now still not possible as a federal judge temporarily halted the deal.
Even more so, on Monday, Elon Musk’s X has already filed an objection when it comes to The Onion’s tries to purchase out of bankruptcy Info Wars, saying that it has a “superior ownership” over the X accounts.
X Corporation claims that it has ownership over the X accounts including the account operated by Alex Jones and InfoWars, according to the objection filed by X Corp on Monday in the bankruptcy court.
So, X, Elon Musk’s platform argues with the satirical platform, The Onion, whether or not they have permission to purchase the rights from Jones's X accounts, because they are not his to sell in the first place.
The objection filed by the social media platform X added the platform “grants each user a ‘personal, worldwide, royalty-free, non-assignable and nonexclusive license to use the software provided,”.
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It is also worth mentioning that this is not the first time when Musk has interfered with Jones’s social media presence. In 2023, Elon Musk restored the social media account of Alex Jones from InfoWars. Previously, Twitter banned those accounts from the social media platform in 2018, due to the post's abusive content that had back than violated the platform’s rules. However, after Elon Musk became the new CEO of the social media platform, although he did not agree with Jones visions’s he restored his account as an act of “free speech”.
Coming back to the present, Musks’s lawyer claim that users don’t really have the right over their platform. “The ‘sale’ of the X Accounts as the Trustee requests would be a wrongful transfer of the license to use X Corp.’s Services. Such a sale would plainly violate X Corp.’s TOS and its ownership rights,”, said the lawyers representing X Corporation. Also adding “In other words, the Trustee is seeking to sell something that neither it, Free Speech Systems, nor Jones owns or has any legal interest in.”.
That being said, X Corporation claims that due to the agreed terms and conditions, the accounts are the “exclusive property” of X Corporation. And that users do not have permission to sell or transfer their account to another person without X’s consent.
Further information is to be reported as Judge Christopher Lopez said on Monday that the decision regarding whether or not the account could be purchased by The Onion is on hold.
By
Bill O'Neill
•
November 27, 2024 6:10 PM
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