Internet Archive's big battle with music publishers ends in settlement

A search for "Internet Archive rumors" returns a copy of Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" on my first page of results. Playable in browser and downloadable in high-quality lossless format.

The book lawsuit was over current titles (not really archival and preservation), and the record lawsuit wasn't really about the rare 78s, it was about the modern Jimi Hendrix and Paul McCartney records that somehow slipped in. And their refusal to follow the modern law that they themselves celebrated that made what they're trying to do (including downloads) explicitly legal. But that law prohibited fundraising, and they couldn't resist tweeting out links to Frank Sinatra records with a big banner on top asking for money.

In both lawsuits the discovery revealed tech debt and sloppy process at the Archive that made it impossible for them to argue on behalf of the future we all want.

What's the URL? Curious if it's still valid and if it were uploaded by some random user or one of the archiving projects.

"Somehow slipped in" - are you fr rn?

I don't wonder anything about that, was very convenient.

> not really archival and preservation

The trick is you want them to be archived now when they're readily available not years from now when they're hard or impossible to find. The difficulty is justifying holding on to them that long when they can't be accessed and deciding when they should be exposed.

Are you claiming the copyright holders put them there?

You might want to be specific about which ones were some kind of false flag conspiracy plot (is it just "Rumours"?) because there are thousands and thousands of pirated pieces of media on archive.org. I am behind there being some kind of archive project but as things stand the site was/is just Mega with a veneer of respectability.

Internet Archive continues to leak the verified email address of the uploader of each item, so conspiracy guy can run a spot check should he so desire.

The Archive purchased 78s likely destined to be destroyed. These where digitized. [0]

"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." [1]

Benn Jordan discussion of piracy in general. [2]

[0] https://great78.archive.org/

[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/internet-archi...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7EHRpnJICQ&t=952s

Mega isn't indexed and decrypts content in javascript on the client. If people are using it to share your stuff, you have to find where they're sharing it to even find out that it's on there. Now, Hollywood did this to themselves, because back when it was Megaupload the fact that they had a search index was used as an excuse to shut down the whole service because a couple of employees used it to access infringing stuff without taking it down, so Mega got rid of that as a means to prevent it from happening again.

Internet Archive is searchable and executes DMCA takedown notices. If something of yours is on there and you don't want it to be, it's not because they're making it hard to change that.

Link to the tech debt aspect? I knew that was the case but want to know specifics.

Also the book lawsuit wasn't over old or new titles, it was loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic". I didn't think it was a great idea at the time and everything in that lawsuit has pointed towards it just being an outright foolhardy effort. There were on a great path towards expanding digital lending boundaries (by letting any library add their books to the IA's lending circulation) and screwed it all up.

>it was loaning them 1:N instead of 1:1 because "pandemic

It was over loaning them 1:1, the pandemic actions were barely mentioned as part of the lawsuit and the result is that 1:1 loaning was ruled illegal. The only harm the pandemic actions did was to public opinion.

Fair if true, though it's not like someone uploading things to IA is likely to be using an address like michael.scott @ dundermifflin.com or something. More likely it's something anonymous. Certainly so if they were planting things to sue over, you can bet they'd use an account like dsfhakeij@ mail.ru or something.

Here's one: https://archive.org/details/FleetwoodMacRumours

For extra awesome use their Winamp clone. It really whips the llama's ass.

https://archive.org/details/fleetwood_mac-1977-rumours?webam...

Also environmental conditions (ie. fires) can ruin physical archives in the long run.

That's what I said? The pandemic excuse was IA's reason for doing it at first.

Or, the 1:1 lending was probably okay until Kahle showed his willingness to abandon copyright entirely with the emergency library, and publishers decided it was worth putting down CDL as a whole.

Yep. Historically, some of the hardest stuff to find are the things that were common and people assumed would always be available and known.

What modern law(s) are you referring to? (Serious question, interested in learning more)

The book publishers had been building a case against the CDL for a decade. They saw an opportunity to control the narrative and took it.

Music Modernization Act (2018). A long overdue tiny step into common sense copyright reform.

https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundr...

"The legislation also establishes a process for lawfully engaging in noncommercial uses of Pre-1972 Sound Recordings that are not being commercially exploited. To qualify for this exemption, a user must file a notice of noncommercial use after conducting a good faith, reasonable search, and the rights owner of the sound recording must not object to the use within 90 days."

Basically Internet Archive could've sent a spreadsheet of works to the Copyright Office and anyone claiming commercial use of these old records had to respond within 90 days. In the lawsuit Brewster is quoted saying that it makes pre-1972 works "Library Fair Use."

The law does not allow people to make commercial use of these recordings (take three seconds to consider why). But they could've archived old recordings all day and then made the ones that cleared the list immediately available for unlimited download. And provided excerpts of the others for research purposes.

Instead they managed to get sued for $696 million. For a side project that nobody cared about (40,000+ downloads) that managed to put the whole org (and several participants' personal assets) at risk for two years.

As an aside, 78 RPM records are not particularly fragile. As a consumer product, yes. By preservation standards, no.

"With proper care and storage, this durable resource can last for centuries" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J116v08n02_04

> The Archive purchased 78s likely destined to be destroyed.

It's worse than that.

Many large collections were donated to the archive, under the agreement they would be made available to the public. Part of what influenced Brewster to double down on his original error.

> The Joe Terino Collection, a collection of 70,000 78 rpm singles stored in a warehouse for 40 years.

> The Barrie H. Thorpe Collection, which had been deposited at the Batavia Public Library in Batavia, Illinois, in 2007 by Barrie H. Thorpe (1925–2012). It contains 48,000 singles.

> The Daniel McNeil Collection, with 22,359 singles.

Many more listed at Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_78_Project

At the same time Internet Archive also launched the "Unlocked Recordings" collection of modern "out of print" LPs, as if that somehow made them free to distribute. The inclusion of Jimi Hendrix, Paul McCartney, and Nina Simone records is called out in the lawsuit.

This is how you ruin the reputation of an organization.

Uploaded by user "Ultra Lo Fi Experimental" who appears to be putting lots of big name releases on there, I can't understand why they would do this.

The Reddit support groups are pretty enlightening. Many people think they're just adding things in to a public library and somehow this is all perfectly legal.

It's charming and reminiscent of the best old-school Wikipedia energy. People on the fringe (and probably some OCD people) finding something to do. Curation and contribution feels good, man.

But yeah, holy shit. Brewster Kahle and Jason Scott have said "upload away, we'll figure it all out later" -- then themselves uploaded hundreds of thousands of items to set an example.

"Please don't upload copyrighted material" would go a long way at the top of that PHP upload form. Better yet a checkbox: "This is copyrighted. Archive it but don't republish it." But I suppose where's the fun in that.