The Internet Archive needs your help.
A coalition of major record labels has filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive—demanding $700 million for our work preserving and providing access to historical 78rpm records. These fragile, obsolete discs hold some of the earliest recordings of a vanishing American culture. But this lawsuit goes far beyond old records. It’s an attack on the Internet Archive itself.
This lawsuit is an existential threat to the Internet Archive and everything we preserve—including the Wayback Machine, a cornerstone of memory and preservation on the internet.
At a time when digital information is disappearing, being rewritten, or erased entirely, the tools to preserve history must be defended—not dismantled.
This isn’t just about music. It’s about whether future generations will have access to knowledge, history, and culture.
Sign our open letter and tell the record labels to drop their lawsuit.
Would they have sued if you had only digitized and documented the albums, offering them for private access, without also offering public access on the site itself?
But… that’s not the point of the Archive. The point of the Archive is to make things publicly available.
Sadly, they would.
It may not be about music per se; corporations are willingly or unwillingly acting towards current authoritarian power structure’s goals. The orange-faced Adolf wannabe and his lackeys would be happy to see IA taken off the picture, an equivalent of burning books from Institut der Sexwissenschaft in 1930s Germany, erasing preserved knowledge and records about anyone the current administration doesn’t like, pre-censorship US government materials, scientific papers and many others.
This is not a matter of democratic party. What about last time when it was a book company that tried taking archive down? Im not going to point fingers at Joe Biden for that though, because he had no doing in that. I dont like Trump either, but I seriously doubt he would dedicate his time to such frivioulous matters like taking down copyrighted music from some website (from his perspective). And I feel as though the argument of “trying to hide things” can extend to the Democratic party as well. Also, why would the Republican party attack music of all things if they are trying to hide evidence of something?
Just like last time where it was a random book publisher not connected to the government, its random music publishers, who are known for wanting to protect their copyrighted material by any means neccessary, going after a service that has their music available for free.
I know I am unable to change your opinion, but I dont think this is a malicious attack from the government.
Corporations engage in lawsuits regularly to protect both their IP and market position. Your pseudo-intellectual conspiracy theory is completely unfounded in reality while demonstrating a fundamental ignorance in the subject matter. Please refrain from fear-mongering in the future and perhaps read the complaint filed against the Internet Archive first the next time you feel like injecting unhelpful conspiracy nonsense into unrelated discussions.
For your reference, the lawsuit may be found online by simply searching Case 1:23-cv-07133. Hope this helps.
The Internet Archive needs legal assistance, not uninformed conspiracies that serve no other purpose than to stroke your own ego by demonstrating just how much you hate Mr. Orange-Man™
Hear Hear. Thank you for some sanity.
To: XYZ
That is like asking an R victim “if you wern’t wearing that shirt would he have R’d you?”
It would be great to see who the coalition of record labels is so people can make efforts to boycott their artists.
You’d think the Internet Archive would have put in the effort to allow us to read the actual complaint instead of obfuscating it. The plaintiffs are:
– UMG Recordings, INC,
– Capitol Records, LLC,
– Concord Bicycle Assets, LLC,
– CMGI Recorded Music Assets LLC,
– Sony Music Entertainment
– Arista Music
Yeah so I signed the petition, but I didn’t “chip in”. I would have chipped in for legal fees, but the change.org petition chip-in is just for them to put the petition on their front page? and send an email?
There is a Donate link at the top of this page…
Internet Archive is just doing a great job in preserving media that would otherwise have been lost. The difference here is preserving not profiting from.
Too bad those greedy corporations don’t see it that way. They never did.
Until ‘old’ (but copyright material) has laws to protect good faith archival by collections, museums and archives, then copyright holders (however wrong it seems) have every incentive to aggresively “protect” their interests.
I personally think that if the contested material is apparently claimed as copyright it should be removed from the archive immediately, but with the catlog entries being updated to indicate why. It SHOULD ideally have been removed when the Music Modernisation Act passed, but the Internet Archive may have had reasons to do otherwise.
I will be very annoyed and dissapointed , if I loose access to clearly open resources on the site (or the entire site), such as the high quality scans of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, resources I have used for numerous researches to determine the status of old material, precisely to avoid using in copyright material in specific situations.
The Internet Archive did not ask to be sued over clearly good faith efforts, but sometimes a better strategy is to admit that due to changes in circumstances a curtailing and termination of certain projects is the better option.
The TIA would’ve been sued either way.
Is there any back up plan in case the worst does happen?
Probably not. Even if there are, it wouldn’t help.
Maybe storing a copy of all archived data in a safe place until the day psychopaths are removed from power.
Fighting against big corporate money is pointless. They will crush you, whatever it takes, it’s just the cost of operation for them. Petitions and public outcry may only delay the inevitable. The only solution is to gain the government support, but you lack the resources to lobby for it. Instead you should focus on securing the data long-term. Move it somewhere outside the reach of their hands and lawyers. Maybe to a faraway island, or p2p network.
Moving it far away won’t be enough. They’ll find it eventually.
I fully support TIA (The Internet Archive) as a library for abandoned works. I am disabled, and if I had the money, I’d donate some. All I can offer is moral support.
TIA has saved the retro community with access to abandoned projects…
Why dont they just sue the internet and www?
Let us know who it is so we can convince them to change their mind..
These guy will NEVER change their mines with money involved.
How else are they going to pay for their private jets?
If I was POTUS, I would just withdraw from the Berne Convention and reverse all those stupid copyright laws, to get the Internet Archive out of this mess.
Unless you’re bribe by an offer you couldn’t refuse.
I love internet archive, but I would just delete those record recordings instead of paying the record industry’s ridiculous fine and ruining everything else that’s good about the site. Not worth it just to please a handful of vinyl loving purists out there
I agree.
I want to donate money,but im Chinese,and i do not have us dolars
Unfortunately, Internet archive elected to both digitize and host the old recordings in the country with the world’s most ridiculous copyright law, especially with respect to sound recordings. The so-called “Music Modernization Act” technically left any actual copyright in pre-1972 recordings under the laws of the fifty states while creating a federal performance right for such recordings ex nihilo. The net effect of this – from the finest congress money can buy – is that all sound recordings from 1925 through 1971 are subject to the newly minted performance right, a de-facto copyright – even for a recording of public domain music by composers like Bach, Mozart and Joplin. Other countries are less insane. Sound recordings published before 1963 are public domain in the EU, to give one example. So are composers and other authors dead over 70 years.
In light of the court record in the United States regarding the fair use provisions in the copyright law – which is basically the entire basis of archive.org’s defense – things look very grim indeed. A better argument could be made that sound recordings lack even a modicum of originality under the high threshold set by the supreme court decision in Feist v. Rural. Even if one accepts that a sound recording (versus a performance) has enough original content to qualify they are at best derivative works and should not be eligible for a performance right. Hopefully the valuable preservation work done can be rescued by donating it to an independent entity in another country with more reasonable copyright laws where it can be stored and curated for eventual release. What a sad mess this is.
Germany is worse for copyright rules. Try going on YouTube for free music there!
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including the Wayback Machine, a cornerstone of memory and preservation on the internet.
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It may, just possibly, also be a source of annoyance, embarrassment, and outright humiliation for the sorts of governments and corporations who spend their time lying their arses off (which seems to be most of them these days). So much so it would not surprise me at all to learn that corporate types moaning about old 78 recordings is merely the ostensible reason for this lawsuit, whilst wanting to see the Wayback Machine disappear is the actual one.
Consider how inconvenient it is for these governments and corporations to have a tool online that allows anyone to go back, take a screenshot of the exact thing the government/corporation are swearing up and down they never, ever said (honest!) and ask, “What about this, then, eh?”
700 million is quite a sum of money, but ask yourself: how much would that lot be willing to club together and pay to make the WM go away for good and save them all of the embarrassment they are subjected to year-in, year-out as a result of it being online and accessible to everyone?
(Just a thought.)
When Kahle mentioned “political faults” in that 1996 server room video, he was damn right. It’s almost like he could predict the future.
I think it would be entirely fair for the community of librarians, academics and users to start their own “asteroid-impact” backup efforts, of the Internet Archive. Especially the large institutional collections, whose donated materials were provided in good faith.
Annoyingly one potential resources that would be harder to find without the Internet Archive is the” Catagog of Copyright Entries”, of which IA has high quality scans. As these derive from Federal Works, I can’t see why there would be any objections to these being hosted on numerous external sites. I’ve used these scans to help determine the status of material an numerous instances. I would have niavely hoped that the interests of copyright holders, would be enhanced by being able to determine if specific early material has in fact expired or not
There are volumes of the CCE that aren’t necessarily as accessible at high quality in other archives. (I’ve had to use specfic volumes to locate sometimes highly obscure compositions and dramas.)..
I would strongly suggest someone starts mirroring material like these that can be confirmed as public domain (or Creative Commons) items to other archives like Hathi Trust and Wikimedia Commons after reading this post.
That said, I do not want to IA to crash again due to high level bandwidth use resulting from a community driven migration to multi hosting of the “public domain”. ;)…
If IA was to pivot to being a public domain preserver, I will continue to support the preservation of freely licensed materials and that which has expired.
Is there any back up plan in case the worst does happen?
The IA management are responsible for this state of affairs. If they hadn’t goaded the copyright holders, with the COVID library, this wouldn’t be happening. Before you ask for more of our money, it would be nice to see a little contrition.
Those copyright holders would’ve sued anyway because of greed.
I will note that back in 2020, certain indviduals within the Wikimedia community, made some efforts to ensure public domain resources (such as scanned public domain books and US Federal documents) did not vanish.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:IA_books
Not that IA would make formal donations of course.
I hope that you don’t mind if I express some dissenting comments. Did you check this before starting the Great 78 Project? I feel as if, after the legal defence in the Hachette case got zero sympathy from the courts, it was fairly obvious that the legality of all digital archiving should be checked first. Given the existential threat now, it would have been worthwhile to check which 78 records were under copyright or not. We can’t go on having to fight off existential challenges every few years. Even if you survive this case, what if you get sued again for something else in a few years’ time? Supporters’ money and energy will run dry eventually, and what then?
I will go slightly more strongly than I hinted at earlier. The Internet Archive should be rethinking what is essentially an ideologically based position immediately. Whilst preserving old media is a laudable goal, at some point a pragmatic and practically based “protect what you can” attitude is the only sensible response, to overly aggressive rights holders, who are not going to be reasonable. I would of course not be dissapointed if the Interent Archive started blanking material it understands might be in copyright (a policy other archives have, and which I have never had an issue with), an explanation left in the catalog entries, so that disappointments and annoyances can be directed at the agressive rights holders rather than at IA.
As stated above, other projects should also be being provided with the public domain resources, like returning scans to the institutional collections and providers, who legitimately licensed material to the IA collections in good faith, only to see those collections placed at risk, apparently because of an ideological stance they did not ask for or necessarily support.
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I hope that you don’t mind if I express some dissenting comments. Did you check this before starting the Great 78 Project?
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I cannot speak for the Archive, but here is what happened: The Internet Archive preserving 78s was legal at the time IA was doing it. What suddenly made the Great 78 Project illegal was the passage of the Music Modernization Act *after* the recordings had been preserved and posted online.
The Archive cannot hope to check on laws when new copyright laws are created out of thin air, are written solely for the benefit of rightholders rather than the public, and have the ability to make things that were once legal now illegal after the fact.
Believe me, I am a strong believer in double-checking stuff, too, but the Archive is not doing anything wrong here. Rather, US politicians have made it wrong by passing laws out of thin air that put the Archive in the wrong after the fact.
(And yes, it is just as ridiculous as it sounds.)
As I understand it, the MMA applied a federal copyright to 78RPM records when it had previously been up to US States. There were still 78RPMs in copyright under the law of California though. It seems as if the law made it easier to enforce copyright on music online by making it a USA-wide standard.
I would favour deleting those still in copyright. Why risk losing the entire Internet Archive over this? We cannot expect the courts to agree with the “universal access to all knowledge” slogan.
I’ll sign, but honestly at this point you may need to consider what would be best to save IA/Wayback Machine, because I don’t think anyone has any illusions about you winning or being spared this fight. The deck is heavily stacked against you, and the courts in this country in this day and age are not going to protect a non-profit against a corporation about old recordings. I’m fully on your side, but I cannot imagine your arguments about those old vinyls being fair use winning the day. Right now we are at a serious risk of losing the most extensive and important resource for preserving endangered media and the old internet that has ever been attempted before or since. We stand a very real risk of losing EVERYTHING here, and you going as far as you have in this fight may have made this a foregone conclusion.
While I appreciate the Archive’s efforts to preserve various media – personally I’m vastly more invested in the *Internet* Archive, and it makes me nervous that you guys keep putting that at risk with what seem like side projects in comparison. (It IS named the “Internet Archive”.) If the Wayback Machine disappears because you guys got in a fight over a handful of old vinyl records, no matter how culturally significant, I don’t know what I’ll fill that gap with; you’re the only people doing this at scale. Can you at least insulate the Internet Archive from the riskier projects? Some kind of ablative shell company?
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(It IS named the “Internet Archive”.)
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It is. However, taken as a whole, it is the “Internet” part that is subservient to the “Archive” part rather than the other way around.
All those “side projects” you mentioned are the Archive’s entire reason for being: IA does stuff that other libraries and archives can’t or won’t do due to constraints of time, money, etc. Yes, the Wayback Machine is used by a lot of people, but it still represents only a part of what the Archive is trying to do: make the sum total of human knowledge available to all. The Internet just happens to be the means they use to make it accessible to everyone.
(Viewed this way, all those “side projects” suddenly make a lot more sense.)
Everyone has their own favourite bit of IA, but it is *all* important because even seemingly obscure things like 78 records are still part of our past. And if it is part of our collective past, the Archive is interested in trying to preserve it and make it available for future generations to view, understand, and enjoy (and reuse).
The point being: we can’t pick and choose the parts of the Archive we’d like to see survive – this is very much an “all or nothing” proposition. The IA isn’t fighting over some 78 records relatively few people care about. Rather, they are contesting the current US law which says, in essence, that it is okay for US politicians to re-write copyright law so that things that were previously in the public domain (like 78s) are suddenly taken out of it whenever a rights owner happens to decide they haven’t yet wrung enough nickels out of something someone long-dead created decades ago.
The original idea behind copyright law was to give creators a decade or two of protection to allow them to make money off their creations. Unfortunately, the law has now metastasised into something far beyond what it was originally supposed to do.
(I mean, which of us thinks that an audio recording from half a century ago hasn’t yet turned a fair profit for the author? Only groups like the RIAA seem to hold this view and deem it reasonable.)
If there is a problem here, I’d say it has to do with deficiencies in US copyright law and its grossly disproportionate favouring of rights holders, rather than with what IA is or isn’t doing.
This doesn’t make sense. If you want to survive this, you need to stop wasting time with letter-writing campaigns and get serious. You need a good attorney — someone aggressive, strategic, and not afraid to put the fear of god into the other side. You should be countersuing them for at least twice what they’re asking for. There are dozens of grounds to do it if you have an attorney with an ounce of imagination: unlawful interference with operations, damage to organisational reputation, attempts to chill fair use and educational access, malicious misuse of copyright claims, and reckless disregard for the public interest, just for a start.
This isn’t just about preserving old music, it’s about the right to preserve history full stop, and the Internet Archive is standing exactly where traditional libraries, museums, and cultural institutions have always stood. Lending systems for physical media have existed for decades and no one sued them into oblivion.
Strategically, you’re better off pushing to get a countersuit filed immediately and forcing this in front of a judge as fast as possible. You need to put them on tilt. Make them spend money, time, and energy reacting to you instead of dictating the terms. Right now they’re operating like they assume you’ll fold. If you go straight at them, hard and fast, there’s every chance they’ll panic or crumble before this ever reaches trial. But you have to hit first and hit hard.
The only thing bullies like this respect is a real, immediate threat of loss. Make it expensive for them. Make it public. Make them regret ever thinking they could erase you.
Earier I mentioned the CCE, Archive.org’s scans of it are even directly linked from copyright.gov ( I thought they might be locally hosted there, but are not.) It would be somewhat embarassing, if a semi-officialyl backed partnerships collection were to become unavailable because of the actions of various corporate rights. At some point IA WAS considered on par with traditional libraries.
Are these record labels publishing recordings of these discs at this time, or are they out of print? If they are out of print and don’t intend to print, they are in effect abandoned just like old books and discontinued software. Is TIA interested in the physical vinyl records as historical artifacts or just recordings from them? Preservation of one or the other presumably takes on different intentions, methods, and legalities.
Someone creates something that immeasurably helps people, but because it hurts the profits of the super powerful, they try to shut it down.
If you control the Information… You control the Population