‘Wholesale Theft’: Labels Sue Internet Group for Copyright Infringement Over Digitized Vinyl Records

Bill Donahue
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Universal Music, Sony Music and Concord are suing the Internet Archive over a project to digitize old vinyl records from Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and other iconic artists, calling it “blatant” copyright infringement under a “smokescreen” of preservation.

In a complaint filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, the labels took aim at the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project,” in which thousands of physical records have been digitized and made available to users for free. They called the project “wholesale theft of generations of music.”

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“The Great 78 website is a massive, unauthorized, digital record store of recordings,” lawyers for the music companies wrote. “Although Internet Archive describes the Great 78 Project’s goal as ‘the preservation, research and discovery of 78 rpm records,’ the Great 78 Project is actually an illegal effort to willfully defy copyright law on an astonishing scale.”

Though they claim “hundreds of thousands” of songs have been illegally copied, the labels are specifically suing over 2,749 songs – every single one of which, they say, is already available on legal digital services. They include iconic tracks like Crosby’s “White Christmas” and Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.”

“Defendants [cannot] justify their activities as necessary to preserve historical recordings,” the music companies wrote. “These recordings face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”

In a blog post on Monday, the Internet Archive said “we take this matter seriously and are currently reviewing the lawsuit with our legal counsel.” The group stressed that the Great 78 project had “preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium.”

“When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said in the statement. “When people want to study sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”

The lawsuit is hardly the Internet Archive’s first dust-up with copyright law. The group fought to invalidate legislation passed by Congress in the 1990s that added years onto the length of a copyright’s term of protection, and is currently embroiled in a lawsuit filed by the major book publishers over a COVID-era library project that scanned physical books and lent them to users for free. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that Internet Archive’s project was not a legal fair use of the publishers’ books.

In Friday’s complaint, the music companies cited the Internet Archive’s “long history of opposing copyright laws” and previous efforts to “improperly … wrap its infringing conduct in the ill-fitting mantle of fair use.”

“Having failed repeatedly in Congress and the courts, Internet Archive now chooses to simply willfully disobey the copyright laws of which it is acutely aware,” lawyers for the music companies wrote.

At issue in Friday’s complaint are so-called pre-1972 songs – a category of music that was previously not covered by federal sound recording copyrights. But in 2018, federal lawmakers extended such protection to the old songs as part of the Music Modernization Act. In their complaint, the music companies said they were suing to “vindicate the rights Congress has granted creators in pre-1972 sound recordings.”

“When Defendants exploit Plaintiffs’ sound recordings without authorization, neither Plaintiffs nor their artists see a dime,” the companies wrote. “Not only does this harm Plaintiffs and the artists or their heirs by depriving them of compensation, but it undermines the value of music.”

The lawsuit is seeking so-called statutory damages for each copyrighted song allegedly infringed, which could total $412 million if fully granted. But such damages totals are heavily litigated and could be substantially lower if the case ever reaches a final judgment.

In addition to naming the Internet Archive itself as a defendant, the lawsuit also individually names the group’s founder, Kahle, as well as George Blood, an audio engineer who allegedly worked on the Great 78 project.

Read the entire complaint filed against the Internet Archive here:

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