Archived version: https://archive.ph/ZGo6X
Universal Music Group (UMG.AS), Sony Music Entertainment (6758.T) and other record labels on Friday sued the nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its streaming collection of digitized music from vintage records.
The labels’ lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive’s “Great 78 Project” functions as an “illegal record store” for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.
They named 2,749 sound-recording copyrights that the Archive allegedly infringed. The labels said their damages in the case could be as high as $412 million.
Representatives for the Internet Archive did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.
The San Francisco-based Internet Archive digitally archives websites, books, audio recordings and other materials. It compares itself to a library and says its mission is to “provide universal access to all knowledge.”
The Internet Archive is already facing another federal lawsuit in Manhattan from leading book publishers who said its digital-book lending program launched in the pandemic violates their copyrights. A judge ruled for the publishers in March, in a decision that the Archive plans to appeal.
The Great 78 Project encourages donations of 78-rpm records – the dominant record format from the early 1900s until the 1950s – for the group to digitize to “ensure the survival of these cultural materials for future generations to study and enjoy.” Its website says the collection includes more than 400,000 recordings.
The labels’ lawsuit said the project includes thousands of their copyright-protected recordings, including Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”.
The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”
Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday.
all dead people
Songs of this vintage should be pirated out of principle IMO.
The artist has made their money from it and lived a good life - no record label should be able to line their pockets with the profits of a dead person’s work from my perspective.
More than that, these need to be in the public domain. This is our shared cultural heritage being held hostage, and 99.9% of it doesn’t even earn anyone anything at all.
Copyright should be 30 years. Long enough to extract any reasonable economic value from the work, but a time scale that gives balance to public benefit.
Why can’t we have nice things? These people are literally just archiving and preserving old media, and if I recall correctly, they have strict rules of sharing these archived media.
I kinda understand why they got sued by Wiley/HarperCollins due to breaking the rules of sharing unlimited copies of archived books, but this time it doesn’t look like it.
Honestly, I hope Internet Archive survives all these lawsuits they’re dealing with
Also there are so many ways to get music I doubt people would be flocking to the internet archive for it.
Yeah, it doesn’t add up. Why would one go to the restricted access distributor if they can get a lot more by pirating?
Well it would be a positive step forward if we could normalise sharing old shit like Frank Sinatra music without having to worry about drawing the ire of a publishing company exec about to buy his 10th yatch. Piracy is cool but it would be better to eliminate reasons which make piracy almost necessary in the first place.
