Internet Archive Ends Legal Battle With Record Labels Over Historic Recordings (sfchronicle.com)
- Reference: 0179271204
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/15/228226/internet-archive-ends-legal-battle-with-record-labels-over-historic-recordings
- Source link: https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/internet-archive-universal-music-settlement-21049748.php
> The [3]case (PDF), UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, [4]targeted the Archive's Great 78 Project , an [5]initiative to digitize more than 400,000 fragile shellac records from the early 20th century. The collection includes music by artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, and has been made available online for free public access. Record labels including Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records had sought $621 million in damages, arguing the Archive's streaming of these recordings constituted copyright infringement.
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> The Internet Archive, based in San Francisco's Richmond District, describes itself as a digital library dedicated to providing "universal access to all knowledge." Its director of library services, Chris Freeland, acknowledged the settlement in a brief statement. "The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter," he wrote.
[1] https://blog.archive.org/2025/09/15/an-update-on-the-great-78s-lawsuit/
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/article/internet-archive-universal-music-settlement-21049748.php
[3] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.422515/gov.uscourts.cand.422515.180.0.pdf
[4] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/03/07/221238/music-labels-will-regret-coming-for-the-internet-archive-sound-historian-says
[5] https://great78.archive.org/
fraidy cats (Score:2)
Appears to me as if the record companies were afraid to litigate on this one and establish any additional precedent on fair use that would run contrary to their interests.
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nail on head there. why risk a ruling not in there favor seeing internet archive fighting back on works they dont even make money on anymore.
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Appears to me as if the record companies were afraid to litigate on this one and establish any additional precedent
Possibly, but it takes two to settle, and the terms are confidential, so we don't know whose paying who or who is conceding what if anything. You have to have the defendant's permission or leave to withdraw a case. If the Archive were so confident about winning and establishing a precendent, then they probably would not have agreed to settle. That means they probably regarded their chan
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The problem with fair use law is that it is not very settled, and every case is a bit of a wildcard for both parties. We don't know if they assessed their chances of winning at 80% but the cost of time & money to litigate as too much of a burden. We also don't know what was offered in the settlement.
Fuck our corporate overlords (Score:2)
Where is it in the public interest where corporations can sue a nonprofit organization into oblivion over the attempt to preserve a public work from a historical figure that the corporation has itself abandoned? And where in Hell on Earth do these corporations think that the damages incurred are valued at $621 million dollars? Do they think they're losing out on $621 million dollars in shellac record sales ?
It's in the public interest to preserve these works. If corporations aren't doing the work, then I
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blame the us government there. there the ones that keep granting extensions for no real reason.
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It is not. We need to ask our legislators to get stronger exceptions for libraries added to the law.
There ALREADY are exceptions, but for some dumb shit reason a lot of digital stuff, such as copying sound recordings to a digital format, or streaming a library copy digitally, is specially excluded from or not covered by the exceptions which are written into the law for libraries that would apply if the library were disseminating the work using an analog medium to someone physically present. The int
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We need to ask our legislators to get stronger exceptions for libraries added to the law.
Nah. We just need to revert to original copyright terms. 14 years, with one 14 year renewal. No one is creating content expecting it to take more than 28 years to make it worth their while. US copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times..." Extending those Times doesn't promote, instead it works against Progress.
I can point to a lot of copyrighted material w
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preserve public work.
No - it's not public work - it is a commercial product. There is no abandoment here. You can still buy Sinatra on Amazon.
If it were anything to do with preserve, they wouldn't be streaming it and only keeping it on file.
> $621 Million We don't know the extent of what they were distributing.
All we do know, is that the "archive" acted in a napster like pirate fashion by dl'ing copyright works - rebroadcasting them and depriving the rightful owners of those copyrights ro
Re: Fuck our corporate overlords (Score:1)
they literally are digitizing decaring physicallt rofting media not downloading songs from itunes and putting them up... and nothing prevents the companies from continuuing to sell that old music for stream or cds or new vinyl or whatever what about all the abandoned games and software internet archive hosts and preserves ? i downloaded a 1980s early midi sequencer program from there; hoping to test it on a emulator and eventually buy the actual vintage hardware if i can find it useful they also host sanc
If you're not making money on it why lock it up? (Score:2)
Everyone knows copyright is out of hand, even the record labels and publishers, but they're not going to fix it. I had the opportunity to ask an author that I liked if she could donate her oldest works, long out of print, to Gutenberg or something so that people could still read and enjoy them. She said she would love to be able to do that, but the publisher wouldn't allow it since they held the copyright.
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The legal department gets paid either way.
Obligatory... (Score:2)
Melancholy Elephants
[1]http://www.spiderrobinson.com/... [spiderrobinson.com]
[1] http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
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> Melancholy Elephants [1]http://www.spiderrobinson.com/... [spiderrobinson.com]
Thank you so much for that! It's extremely on-topic, I enjoyed the hell out of it, and I learned a few things as well.
[1] http://www.spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
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Thanks so very much for sharing this lovely online novel, indeed so relevant to the topic at hand.
It'll be something I treasure and recommend from here on out.
A simple fix (Score:3)
It will probably never happen, but the sane and simple fix is to make ALL copyright ownership end after, say, 30 years. And that would be applied retroactively. The work was first copyrighted in or before, say, 1995? Public domain - no ifs, ands, or buts, and no legal remedies for the copyright owners.
This would put an end to the Internet Archive's battles, and would be a great boon to YouTubers such as Rick Beato, who - courtesy of Universal - frequently suffers copyright strikes and de-monetization in return for promoting artists' music. By extension, it also obsoletes a lot of the arguments around what constitutes 'fair use', simply because many of those arguments are over material that goes back to the 80's, 70's, 60's, and earlier.
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The problem has been continued rollbacks of the public interest in copyright law, and even should some legislator push through your agenda, future Sonny Bonos will emerge to bend the law to the will of their corporate donors.
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There's another fix needed.
If the work is distributed with protection such as DRM then that does not count as a public release and does not get copyright. The first person to release it to the public having broken the protection gets the copyright, but for half of the remaining lifetime or five years, which ever is longer. All works that want copyright should be required to be registered in an actual copyright library as was true long ago.
Damages (Score:2)
Show the damages Universal, Sony Music Entertainment and Capitol Records suffered due to the loss of income from their own digitized product.
[Sound of crickets]
Court finds for the plaintiffs. Defendant to pay $1.
Were these works in danger? (Score:2)
Had anyone digitized these performances already? Were they in danger of being lost once the old records became unreadable?
Either the recordings are still available or not (Score:5, Insightful)
That's all the "comment" we need
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udhr18 udhr19 udhr27
that's all folks.
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There's also [1]this video [youtu.be] showing the Internet Archive negotiator walking back from the meeting with UMG.
[1] https://youtu.be/iHLqce9rBXY?t=116