One Suit Settled

Note: The Internet Archive is the home of the Wayback Machine that allows a look at the web at earlier dates. https://web.archive.org/ Items that are taken down can often be retrieved. It is also the home of a vast digital library of video, audio, print, and photographs. https://archive.org/ The lawsuit described below could have potentially killed it. This blog often uses the Internet Archive to preserve or supply video and audio.

From Rolling Stone: Several major record labels and rights holders have settled their $621 million copyright infringement suit against the Internet Archive over its efforts to digitize, preserve, and share 78 rpm records. Attorneys for both sides filed the joint notice of settlement today in the California district court. It states only that the various plaintiffs — led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment — and the Internet Archive “have settled this matter.” Terms of the settlement are still “pending,” and once they’re hashed out, both sides will file a stipulation to dismiss the case. That is expected to arrive within 45 days. A post on the Internet Archive’s blog read only: “The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.” A lawyer for the plaintiffs declined to comment. The Recording Industry Association of America said, “The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.”

The focus of the lawsuit was the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which officially started in 2017 and aimed to digitize the shellac discs that were the dominant medium for recorded music from the 1890s until the 1940s and 1950s, when vinyl arrived. With the help of audio preservationist George Blood (who was also named as a defendant in the suit), the Archive said it has digitized more than 400,000 of these old recordings.

...The Archive... has always billed itself as a research library (albeit a digital one), and its supporters saw the label’s suit — along with a similar one brought by book publishers — as an attack on preservation efforts and public access to the cultural record... 

Full story at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/internet-archive-labels-settle-great-78-copyright-lawsuit-1235427887/.