The $621M Legal Battle by Record Labels Against Internet Archive

Regardless of what happens here, one of the biggest losses in historical music archives was when what.cd got taken down. Regardless of copyright, it does feel like there is a place for archival indexing of historical recordings. I wish there was some sort of law protecting this. What.cd was clearly offending copyright, with the historical value being a secondary effect, but the internet archive's intent here clearly isn't copyright violation.

Intent should matter.

I feel like the Internet Archive and Murfie are opposite sides of the same coin with our efforts for digitization and access. But Murfie has a completely different approach from a copyright and financial perspective.

So far, the Internet Archive has done more good in the short term than I have with Murfie, but I can't help but feel like their lax approach to copyright law will do more harm for us all in the long run.

If I amass any kind of political power: I'd set copyright for a maximum of 5 years, patents for 10 years, trademarks for 20.

It would kickstart innovation, settle fair use of training data, and protect the internet archive.

On the downside: companies (not artists) would make a bit less rent-style income.

So even the downside is a win, in my book.

Next up: suing NASA for the recordings on the Voyagers' golden records?

It's not as though the record labels themselves have ever shown an inclination to take on this monumental task as a way of thanking the hundreds of artists and the millions of fans that enriched them.

https://archive.ph/85JPm

It's interesting that out of the 400k+ recordings they digitized, only 4142 are claimed as infringements. And it makes sense if everything they digitized is in an old format that went out of favor by the 50s. I think you could argue that NO recording this old should still be under copyright, it should all be in the public domain, or at least subject to archival even if you can't stream it online in one or two clicks.

One step closer to me listening to public domain-only music if I could help it.

> “For LPs and CDs, that’s exactly what we do,” he says. “Seventy-eights, we asked around, we dealt with a lot of collectors, they just said it’s not a problem.” (In an email, Kahle further notes that the Great 78 Project “predates the MMA” and that the “record labels knew about it.”)

> But there’s an even more blunt, obvious way of asking this question that doesn’t require knowledge of byzantine U.S. copyright law. Why didn’t the Internet Archive just think twice before making a song like “The Frim Fram Sauce” or Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas” — the most popular single of all time — available online for free? There wasn’t any concern about even a Frank Sinatra hit on 78?

> For a few moments, it’s just the hearty horns of Bob Haggart and His Orchestra. “It wasn’t a problem,” Kahle says after a beat. “We talked to people, it wasn’t a problem.”

Seriously? Like, why not do this in a responsible way instead of a way that is going to create bad case law?

Work for hire copyright duration of 95 years (from publishing) or 120 years from creation is outrageous.

I just donated money to the Internet Archive.