Major Labels Sue Internet Archive
• Sony Music Entertainment, UMG, Capitol, Concord, CMGI and Arista have filed suit against non-profit Internet Archive, claiming that its posting of thousands of old songs and recordings online amounts to “wholesale theft” of copyright-protected music.
As Fortune reports, the suit, filed last Friday in the US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan), alleges that Internet Archive’s “blatant infringement includes hundreds of thousands of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century,” including Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk. The companies are asking the court to order the Archive to remove all copyrighted material and pay damages of as much as $150,000 for each infringed work, which for the listed recordings would amount to $372 million.
The San Francisco-based Internet Archive maintains a vast digital collection of text, video and music online. On its Great 78 Project website, it posts digitized copies, which it solicits from users, of records in the antiquated 78rpm format. It boasts on the site of having posted more than 400,000 recordings and that its purpose is “the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records.” However, the record companies claim the archive’s altruistic claims are a “smokescreen” to disguise its theft.
The recordings “are already available for streaming or downloading from numerous services” authorized by the record companies, lawyers for the record companies wrote. “These recordings face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.” In 2018, Congress passed the Music Modernization Act that extended the copyright for pre-1972 music to 2067.
Sony is joined in the suit by UMG Recordings Inc., Capitol Records LLC, Concord Bicycle Assets LLC, CMGI Recorded Music Assets LLC and Arista Music.
