Music Labels Sue Internet Archive Over Digitized Record Collection

(Reuters) – Common Music Group, Sony Music Leisure and different report labels on Friday sued the nonprofit Web Archive for copyright infringement over its streaming assortment of digitized music from classic data.

The labels’ lawsuit filed in a federal courtroom in Manhattan stated the Archive’s “Nice 78 Challenge” capabilities as an “unlawful report retailer” for songs by musicians together with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Vacation.

They named 2,749 sound-recording copyrights that the Archive allegedly infringed. The labels stated their damages within the case could possibly be as excessive as $412 million.

Representatives for the Web Archive didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the criticism.

The San Francisco-based Web Archive digitally archives web sites, books, audio recordings and different supplies. It compares itself to a library and says its mission is to “present common entry to all information.”

The Web Archive is already dealing with one other federal lawsuit in Manhattan from main e book publishers who stated its digital-book lending program launched within the pandemic violates their copyrights. A choose dominated for the publishers in March, in a call that the Archive plans to attraction.

The Nice 78 Challenge encourages donations of 78-rpm data — the dominant report format from the early 1900s till the Nineteen Fifties — for the group to digitize to “make sure the survival of those cultural supplies for future generations to review and revel in.” Its web site says the gathering consists of greater than 400,000 recordings.

The labels’ lawsuit stated the venture consists of hundreds of their copyright-protected recordings, together with Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and Duke Ellington’s “It Do not Imply a Factor (If It Ain’t Received That Swing)”.

The lawsuit stated the recordings are all out there on licensed streaming companies and “face no hazard of being misplaced, forgotten, or destroyed.”

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Modifying by David Bario and Diane Craft)

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