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."
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
https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-wins-settlement-military-style-police-raid-171103/
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