The Internet Archive says its Great 78 project is preserving history, but major labels call it a “massive, unauthorized, digital record store of recordings.”
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.”
“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 o
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