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.

  • FaceDeer@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    9
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.”

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        They’re only suing over a subset of the recordings. If half the discography is missing the other half is not, after all.

    • smallaubergine@kbin.social
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • FaceDeer@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • smallaubergine@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          5
          ·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • FaceDeer@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 year ago

            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.