Internet Archive’s legal woes mount as record labels sue for $400M::The Internet Archive also reached a confidential settlement with book publishers.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Major record labels are suing the Internet Archive, accusing the nonprofit of “massive” and “blatant” copyright infringement “of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century.”
“Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists, and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium,” Kahle said.
From their perspective, the Great 78 Project undercuts the industry’s profits from selling licenses to stream some of the world’s most popular recordings of all time on services like Spotify or Apple Music.
Lawyers for record labels did not respond to Ars’ request to comment but wrote in the complaint that the Internet Archive attempts “to defend their wholesale theft of generations of music under the guise of ‘preservation and research,’ but this is a smokescreen: their activities far exceed those limited purposes.”
Because record labels’ lawsuit quickly followed on the heels of a challenge from book publishers who successfully sued the Internet Archive over copyright claims earlier this year, Kahle has questioned the motives of lawyers behind this latest complaint.
“Now the Washington lawyers want to destroy a digital collection of scratchy 78 RPM records, 70 to 120 years old, built by dedicated preservationists in 2006,” Kahle told The New York Times.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Honestly, I love me some internet archive but they should probably lose virtually any given case against them.
Indeed. You can do so here.
You should not trust that I am not a scammer. You can get there yourself without using my shortcut from the archive.org homepage.
Edited due to my late night incompetence (thanks for the headsup @ominouslemon@lemm.ee).
Yo, those links point to archive.is, which has nothing to do with the Internet Archive (archive.org).
FFS, I’m so sorry. I am easily confused.
Both worth supporting, of course.
Worthless leeches. Preservation of media is so important, otherwise so much of our history will be lost to these greedy corporations.
Write your reps folks! I wrote my senators and congressional rep; if enough reps hear about this and realize how important the internet archive is they can help (even having a senator/representative getting in the middle with the threat of changes to the law to protect the internet archive could result in a much more favorable outcome).
Record labels going after this is so classless. Are they going to sue libraries for loaning out cs’s?
