Music labels sue nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over digitized 78s of Frank Sinatra and other artists

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 256 points –
Music labels sue nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over digitized 78s of Frank Sinatra and other artists
fortune.com

Music labels sue nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over digitized 78s of Frank Sinatra and other artists::The labels take issue with the nonprofit posting digitized copies, which it solicits from users, of records in the antiquated 78 LP format.

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Gee, if only this stuff was in the public domain.

"But the author hasn't been dead for a hundred years yet!!"

It's so stupid. I understand people need to make money from their creations but 10 should be more than enough (or something like that).

It really is. Most studies estimate two to three years before the hype begins to die down. But 10 years does seem more reasonable, especially for trilogies or series.

The music industry can get dysentery, those absolute scum of the earth.

Nah, dysentery is too pleasant. They can get Ebola.

Once again lawyers proving that they are one of the lowest forms of human life.

Going to find Sinatra discography, specifically 78s, to DL just to spite these a*holes. I don't even like Sinatra that much. Thanks, Streisand Effect.

Piratebay seems to have it, probably because of this news.

I'd hate to lose the internet archive.. we need archives of stuff.. getting an old bit of hardware to work can be a nightmare when the manufacturer is gone or has deleted all reference to it . Then you find some kind soul has uploaded just what you need to the archive.

I wish more people knew about IPFS -- a content-addressable, persistent filesystem. It's a peer-to-peer system that can offer durable backups to important info. Of course I'm a hypocrite as I realize I haven't been running my IPFS node lately due to upgrades... off I go to fix that.

I came across IPFS a few times but I don't know where to start. Is hosting a node a good role? Did you follow a guide, maybe a nice docker image we can just run?

I don't currently run it myself -- I have some files in IPFS but haven't spun up the daemon on my own server in a while...

Hmm! I just checked their site and since I last looked into it they've added a nice desktop UI. I'll have to try it out myself again.

Hosting a node isn't like running a Tor exit node or anything -- you don't AFAIK host anything you don't explicitly put in there yourself, so there's no danger of accidentally serving something you wouldn't want to :)

This is the best summary I could come up with:


The Internet Archive’s “blatant infringement includes hundreds of thousands of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century,” lawyers for the record companies said in a lawsuit filed Friday in Manhattan federal court.

Among the artists cited: Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk.

They are asking the court to order the archive to remove all copyrighted material and pay damages of as much as $150,000 for each infringed work, which for the listed recordings would amount to $372 million.

The Internet Archive maintains a vast digital collection of text, video and music online.

On its Great 78 Project website, it posts digitized copies, which it solicits from users, of records in the antiquated 78 LP format.

But the record companies says the archive’s altruistic claims are a ”smokescreen” to disguise its theft.


I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Time to go download a copy of the media. Arrrr!

Part of me hopes the labels keep up chasing non-profits over dead artists just to destroy any remaining public support they might have.

I'm happy that I sailed to the sea earlier than being frustrated by this stupid music industry playing money games again.

RECAP filing here, looks incomplete, but the list of evidence is there.

List of songs in complaint (PDF).

One song at random: A Ribbon and a Rose by "Little" Jimmy Dickens.

Are these available anywhere from the Labels? Seems like an issue for DataHoarders and The Streisand Effect.

"How dare you be a library!"

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