Six record companies, including Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group, filed a complaint against the Internet Archive on Friday August 11 in federal court in 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 online digitized versions of physical copies they own. 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 “just a sample” of all the songs hosted on the site – it claims more than 400,000 – without permission, say the plaintiffs, who ask it to remove all offending 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 of “allowing universal access to knowledge”.
For labels, the preservation argument advanced by the Internet Archive is a “smokescreen”: recordings hosted by the site “are already available for streaming or download on multiple platforms” with which there have been contracts. agreements, 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 publishing world. HarperCollins, John Wiley
