In a complaint filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, the labels took aim at the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project,” in which thousands of physical records have been digitized and made available to users for free. They called the project “wholesale theft of generations of music.”“The Great 78 website is a massive, unauthorized, digital record store of recordings,” lawyers for the music companies wrote.
“Defendants [cannot] justify their activities as necessary to preserve historical recordings,” the music companies wrote. “These recordings face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.” In Friday’s complaint, the music companies cited the Internet Archive’s “long history of opposing copyright laws” and previous efforts to “improperly … wrap its infringing conduct in the ill-fitting mantle of fair use.”
At issue in Friday’s complaint are so-called pre-1972 songs – a category of music that was previously not covered by federal sound recording copyrights. But in 2018, federal lawmakers extended such protection to the old songs as part of the Music Modernization Act. In their complaint, the music companies said they were suing to “vindicate the rights Congress has granted creators in pre-1972 sound recordings.
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