Universal Music Group , Sony Music Entertainment and other record labels on Friday sued the nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its streaming collection of digitized music from vintage records.
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."
Yep. If the Internet Archive goes down, piracy is going to be the last bastion of preservation for the masses. It's incredibly fucked up. The whole copyright system is incredibly fucked up.
I suspect after the book loss, copyright lawyers for huge media industries all over the place are drooling over potential earnings.
Makes me feel angry and helpless, honestly. The people in that industry know damn well a rip of an old record isn't the same as a sanitized digital file, but they don't care about preserving shit as much as squeezing a few extra bucks from the super fans and history buffs who may enjoy those files.
These companies will just push their blood money to there then. It'll just turn into the whole PirateBay incident where lobbying got the original site shut down.
Best way to stop this would be to get some heads rolling. Otherwise there will be nothing we can do.
The copyright lobby is crazy powerful and pretty scary.
The whole Kim dotcom raid comes to mind. At the request them, the USA strong armed authorities to storm the guys mansion in new Zealand using helicopters and raid teams, punching and kicking him while he was on the floor, holding him for a month without a bail hearing, seized his assets and trying to extradite him because people were using his storage platform to store copyrighted material - which wasn't even against new Zealand laws at the time.
He later brought a legal suit against them for it and it was settled under wraps and sealed
Rights holders are also why your streaming platform prices keep getting more expensive because they just can't control their greed. People keep complaining Netflix pricing keeps going higher for example but a big part of it is because they are being squeezed for more and more money by rights holders to have their content in their catalog
Internet Archive makes me feel like a visit to an old section of a library that noone visited for a while every time I go there.
It's a shame that the US have at the same time people who treasure the need for preservation of culture and Civilization, and people who would sell their own mothers for the shareholder's profit.
If they don't move to a country with more logical copyright laws, I'm afraid we ll lose the too.
Dammit, 2023 is a year the Internet is gone to hell by the corpos faster than I can remember
The only way we are getting them rights back is when we hold the rich and government hostage like they do with us. When their heads start rolling they might think twice about fucking with our rights.
Well you have the right to remain silent. So there's that.
Beyond that though I'm not really sure. I thought it was fairly clear in the US for a persons rights, but you guys are all over the place these days.
Rights only exist if they are enforced by the legal system. For instance the right not to incriminate yourself usually includes the right not to open stongboxes, cell phones or encrypted data blocks.
Note: If they can (presumably under warrant or established probable cause) get in on their own, say with hacking software or by borrowing your biometrics, that's considered a legitimate investigation practice.
However, law enforcement in the US will often resort to coercion, deception or outright torture to extract a password. The first two are legal by SCOTUS precedent. The last one is not but it's really hard to indict an officer for violence including homicide against a civilian neither armed nor resisting let alone convict one.
Rights only exist so long as we have the capacity to enforce them, just as a hungry tiger isn't concerned for the rights of its prey and will gladly violate them, if able, rights are only useful so long as the government is willing to honor them and make sure they're not violated by powerful interests. once they're not, then those rights cease to matter.
Almost no musician makes any substantial money from music sales. Like at all, it's genuinely extremely rare. Most makes more money from touring and merch.
Buy tickets for their shows at the venue. Buy their merchandise directly from the band. Never go through a middle man. Deal with the musicians directly. They don't really make shit off record sales; they make up the bulk of their money from touring and self-selling merch.
Legally speaking, I don't see how the Internet Archive wins this case. Problem is, what happens then? It would be pretty unfortunate to lose the Internet Archive as a resource, over a risky foray into streaming.
That would have been the legally defensible move. But if this case goes through, they'll be liable for past damages, which would bankrupt them.
IMO, this project of digitising/streaming old records should have been done under a totally separate organization from the get go, because of how risky it is.
The Pirate Bay began an attempt to buy Sealand in 2007, but it never went through with it and the website was never actually located there. Also, due to updated territorial claims by the UK over the years, Sealand is now firmly within British waters and has zero chance of ever being recognized as an actual sovereign state; although the owners still play it off like it's a micronation for the lulz and merch sales the place would be considered pretty firmly subject to UK law in the case of things ever being important.
Aside from all that though, Sealand tried for a time to market themselves as a "data haven" and due to a pile-up of failures and misunderstandings of reality that did not end well for anyone.
It would suck to see the Internet Archive disappear over a bunch of music labels suing them. How am I supposed to see what jcctv.net looked like back in 2011?
(Yes, jcctv.net is a real website. However it doesn't do much today.)