Universal Music Group , Sony Music Entertainment and other record labels on Friday sued the nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its streaming collection of digitized music from vintage records.
Fuck the gatekeepers of culture. Pay your artists a living wage and then you might have some moral ground to stand on. Most of those artists died in poverty as a result of these same companies paying them pennies on the dollar. Now those companies want to strangle their artists’ legacy so they can squeeze the last bits of profit out of their work. This is nothing but vampire capitalism doing its ghoulish best to suck the life and joy out of our collective cultural history.
The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”
Sigh. Once again, it looks like the Internet Archive has gone beyond simply being an archive and has stuck its foot into the legal woodchipper.
If they survive these lawsuits I hope they learn a serious lesson from all this. It’s great that they save and preserve data like this, but they should stop poking the bear. Only make the abandoned stuff easy to download. If something’s currently commercially available then you can leave it up to the pirates to make it “free.”
Only make the abandoned stuff easy to download. If something’s currently commercially available then you can leave it up to the pirates to make it “free.”
Isn’t that what they’re doing? Ive been following the LP section for years now and they make most of the uploads unavailable, you can only do 30 second previews. There a whole section of “unlocked” LPs that seems to be abandoned stuff.
The lawsuit claims otherwise, as I quoted.
I suppose the record labels might be outright lying, but if they’re lying that blatantly in the lawsuit itself that seems likely to backfire. Their lawyers are generally pretty good so I would be surprised if they made a mistake like that.
My guess is they want complete takedown control like they have on YouTube. No real recourse for the platform or for the uploader. Doesn’t matter how fair Archive is being.
Maybe that’s their underlying goal, but that underlying goal doesn’t matter to the point I was making. By putting up music for download that the publishers are currently actively selling the Internet Archive basically handed the music publishers a loaded gun.
It’s just like the “emergency library” debacle, the publishers were fine with turning a blind eye to the Archive violating their copyrights as long as the Internet Archive didn’t try doing anything that would significantly hurt their sales. They could have sued them earlier but it wasn’t a legal slam dunk until the Internet Archive pulled that stupid stunt.
