2023-08-14 11:50:48
The home page of the Internet Archive, August 14, 2023. SCREEN CAPTURE “THE WORLD”
Six record labels, including Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, filed a complaint against the Internet Archive, Friday August 11, with the federal court of Manhattan (United States). The labels accuse the site of illegally hosting 2,749 copyrighted songs and recordings.
At the heart of the complaint: the « Great 78 Project »a community program that aims to enable the “preservation, research and discovery of 78-rpm records” over a period from 1898 to the 1950s, in particular by allowing collectors to put digital versions of physical copies they own online. Among the artists whose songs are cited in the complaint, we find Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Miles Davis.
The list of works cited in the document is not “just a sample” of all the songs hosted on the site – he claims more than 400,000 – without permission, assure the plaintiffs, who ask him to remove all the incriminated content and to pay up to 150,000 dollars (137,000 euros) per opus concerned , for a total of 372 million dollars (340 million euros). In addition to Sony and Universal, the complaint also involves Capitol Records LLC, Concord Bicycle Assets LLC, CMGI Recorded Music Assets LLC and Arista Music.
Another procedure with editors
San Francisco-based Internet Archive is best known for its Wayback Machine, an extensive web page archiving tool, but the site also hosts many books, images and audio recordings. It thus compares itself to a library and has set itself the goal “to allow universal access to knowledge”.
For labels, the preservation argument put forward by the Internet Archive is a « smoke screen » : recordings hosted by the site “are already available for streaming or download on multiple platforms” with which agreements have been made, write the plaintiffs’ lawyers. “These recordings are in no danger of being lost, forgotten or destroyed. »
This procedure is in addition to another complaint against the Internet Archive, this time from the world of publishing. HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, Penguin Random House and Hachette Book Group, a subsidiary of Hachette Livre France, accuse the foundation managing the Internet Archive of offering free digital copies of millions of books subject to copyright. Following an initial decision handed down at the end of March in favor of the plaintiffs, an agreement was found between the partiesbut it must still be validated by a judge, writes the foundation in a blog post published on Friday.
Read also: Twenty years of Web archiving: behind the scenes of a titanic project
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