Sony and other music labels sue Internet Archive for digitizing old records | Hacker News Reader

Sony and other music labels sue Internet Archive for digitizing old records

engadget.com

50 pointsSerCe41 comments

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37100140 ("Record labels hit Internet Archive with new copyright lawsuit", >200 comments)

Full list of the plaintiffs, so that they can be appropriately awarded next time one is shopping for music.

UMG Recordings, Inc. - Capitol Records, LLC - Concord Bicycle Assets, LLC - CMGI Recorded Music Assets, LLC - Sony Music Entertainment - Arista Music

There's only a few music companies in the world. Either you avoid all of them or none of them.

That's easy. I just avoid all of them. Have done since about 2002.

It's not as if their products are overly necessary, or even enjoyable.

Sony particularly is on my boycott list, since the 90s. They've never been the nicest of companies.

Ooooof, at least in the genres I tend to listen to, SME (and numerous sublabels thereof) are basically impossible to avoid.

I can take advantage of how low streaming payouts are, I guess? It's almost like refusing to buy their stuff.

The big record label's negotiated their own streaming payouts, which is largely why the payout rate is now so low for everyone else.

Everyone who is working for these companies should be ashamed of their choice.

From the article and the wording it seems that the distribution of the music is the biggest issue in this case. I don't think the Internet Archive would be in trouble if they archived it offline and then published it after the copyright term expired.

Distribution helps to preserve cultural artifacts. It's more likely for them to survive if they are backed up in different places. History has proven that copyright holders prefer cultural works to be lost than distributed without payment.

Most of early movies have been lost. Tons of music has been lost. Many old video games are only available illegally. We now have technology to archive and distribute cultural artifacts for little to no cost.

It's ridiculous that cultural preservation has become a legal problem not a technical problem as it was for most of human history.

Look up events like the Bronze Age collapse, where a handful people disappeared and took a whole civilization with them. If knowledge and access is more distributed we can avoid similar loss in the future

It seems Mediterranean peoples were weakened by a severe multi-year drought. A handful people (the so called mysterious sea people) with different military strategy overrun multiple bronze age states.

Trade collapse led to impossibility of making bronze weapons, which further amplified collapse. This was possible because tin mines were few and far apart. So it was a vicious cycle triggered by a weak point, on a background of hardship. The lesson is not to depend on a single failure point.

I still get upset when I think about the shutdown of what.cd. It was like burning the Library of Alexandria, all in the name of profit.

Copyright law is anti-culture and anti-knowledge. It's ridiculous how we're purposefully holding back human development so a few megacorps can extract even more value from artists.

no it’s not. you just need to preserve it privately not publicly.

Preservation done privately is a fool's errand. You'll have tiny bits of culture scattered across many owners, none of which will share what they have, not an actual archive that's useful to anyone.

the internet archive operating in private instead of public solves your problem, no?

No, because if it's in private, I can't access it. What good is preservation of knowledge and culture if it can't be accessed by anyone but the select few?

i don’t really understand the connection between “publicly accessible” and “preservation of knowledge and culture”. these are usually distinct subjects.

Who is it being preserved for and why? For a select few, as a bragging point? Or for y'know, all of humanity to preserve their heritage?

If knowledge and culture aren't accessible to the vast majority of people, they're not being preserved for humanity. They're locked away from humanity and they might as well be fully gone.

with this comment you're basically dismissing most museums, universities, archives, etc etc

Are museums not publicly accessible? That's their whole point as far as I'm aware.

How is it persevered if its not distributed? This is already the issue, time and time again the copyright holders in charge of the preservation consider sub-quality or incomplete versions to be "preserved" and its up to passionate individuals to cobble together a definitive, full quality, complete version.

With streaming being so dominant we need relaxed rules on this more than ever and the amount of people copying media instead of streaming it is such a tiny minority the claim its affective the bottom line is ridiculous.

> How is it persevered if its not distributed?

easy. national library.

so, what's your opinion on public libraries?

no opinion. they have what is commonly referred to as “library privilege”.

A library is publicly accessible, just like the Internet Archive. What's the difference?

actually quite a few:

https://www.bl.uk/help/what-is-library-privilege

check out the section “ Your obligations when using the Library Privilege Service”

Isn't IA officially registered as a library? Why shouldn't they have the same privilege?

from what i know on this subject only “national libraries” have a special carve-out for copyrighted works. and even then the rules are very strict.

National to whom? I believe IA has offices in at least three jurisdictions.

> A national library is a library established by a government as a country's preeminent repository of information. Unlike public libraries, these rarely allow citizens to borrow books. Often, they include numerous rare, valuable, or significant works. A national library is that library which has the duty of collecting and preserving the literature of the nation within and outside the country. Thus, national libraries are those libraries whose community is the nation at large. Examples include the British Library in London, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_library

When reading about everything the Internet Archive does, I feel like it is something that the Library of Congress should be doing.

One of the biggest threats to the Internet Archive is legal threats. Having the Library of Congress do that archiving role would get rid of a lot of legal threats.

I feel the US in recent years has gone too far in relying on private entities to fulfill services that really should be public services.

This is not the first time time that copyright law has clashed with public interest: Googles "Project Ocean" is a recent example with significant legal proceedings to serve as illustration for how this type of case is likely to proceed. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-t...

Does anyone know why the Internet Archive seems to be deliberately picking expensive legal fights? Surely they're not really worried that White Christmas will be lost to history.

They're just not digitizing hit songs, they're digitizing forgotten artists and rare recordings. The Internet Archive is extremely valuable to music historians like myself in finding and understanding artists who have never been reissued and whose recordings are difficult to find. If they're forced to pull down these recordings from public access, it will be a huge loss to cultural history.

Yeah, and they'd have a much stronger leg to stand on in court (or more likely never even get dragged into court) if they were focusing only on rare, out-of-print music.

My question stands: why are they deliberately picking this fight?

You can stream them here: https://www.locserendipity.com/PushPlay.html

And LPs here: https://locserendipity.com/LP.html

These websites do not hold the data itself, but only the links to the IA data (don’t want to get sued), so donate to the Internet Archive if you use these regularly.

It seems the Internet Archive itself may be in need of archiving... in a far more distributed manner.

Maybe, but first they need very good, very aggressive lawyers so they can stomp these lawsuits before they can take hold in first place.

Get a judge to set a very good precedent with one of the big labels and then everyone else will think twice before trying to sue them.

as long as they don’t open the archive to the public via the internet they should be ok :)

You'd think, but there are stories rattling around in my head where people have been required to destroy all copies that they themselves possess - IA really does need to have a distributed version of their whole library that is impossible to erase, like pictures of Barbara Streisand's house.

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