Online music archive sued over popular hits by Sinatra, Bing Crosby
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Sony Music Entertainment is one of six major music companies suing the Internet Archive, which maintains a digital collection of text, video and music online.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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MANHATTAN – Sony Music Entertainment and five other major music companies sued the non-profit Internet Archive, saying that its posting of thousands of old songs and recordings online amounts to “wholesale theft” of copyright-protected music.
The Internet Archive’s “blatant infringement includes hundreds of thousands of works by some of the greatest artists of the 20th century”, lawyers for the record companies said in a lawsuit filed on Friday in Manhattan federal court.
Among the artists cited were Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk.
The companies included a list of 2,749 recordings in the lawsuit – including Bing Crosby singing White Christmas – that “is but a small sample” of recordings the archive posted without permission, according to the complaint.
They are asking the court to order the archive to remove all copyrighted material and pay damages of as much as US$150,000 (S$202,815) for each infringed work, which for the listed recordings would amount to US$372 million.
The Internet Archive maintains a vast digital collection of text, video and music online.
On its Great 78 Project website, it posts digitised copies, which it solicits from users, of records in the antiquated 78 LP format.
It boasts on the site of having posted more than 400,000 recordings and that its purpose is “the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records”.
But the record companies said the archive’s altruistic claims were a “smokescreen” to disguise its theft.
The recordings “are already available for streaming or downloading from numerous services” authorised by the record companies, the lawyers for the record companies wrote. “These recordings face no danger of being lost, forgotten or destroyed.”
In 2018, the United States Congress passed the Music Modernisation Act that extended the copyright for music predating 1972 to 2067.
Sony was joined in the suit by other groups including Universal Music Group and Arista Music.
Internet Archive did not respond to a request for comment after business hours on Friday. BLOOMBERG
