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.
Record labels are such greedy fuckers, they sue an non-profit org used as an archive… fuck all of them.
I am actually surprised Internet Archive has not had copyright problems in the past because I have ocasionally downloaded videos that are 1:1 contents from now dead/unseeded torrents.
There really needs to be a rule that if you don’t make your IP available to the public, it becomes public domain after a year.
The labels said their damages in the case could be as high as $412 million.
Yeah, I’m sure. They also said:
The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”
How are you gonna make $4m on those recordings if everyone streams them from Spotify etc? Talking out of both sides of the mouth. Fuck these people.
The music industry is run by piranhas.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
Representatives for the Internet Archive did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint.
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 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.”
I’m a bot and I’m open source!