{"id":7873,"date":"2025-09-18T01:35:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T01:35:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/internet-archive-labels-settle-lawsuit-over-digitizing-old-records\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T01:35:40","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T01:35:40","slug":"internet-archive-labels-settle-lawsuit-over-digitizing-old-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/internet-archive-labels-settle-lawsuit-over-digitizing-old-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Internet Archive & Labels Settle Lawsuit Over Digitizing Old Records"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tU<\/span>niversal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Concord have reached a settlement to end their lawsuit \u00a0against the Internet Archive over a project to digitize old vinyl records from Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and other iconic artists.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn a motion filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, both sides say they have a deal to resolve litigation over the \u201cGreat 78 Project,\u201d in which thousands of physical records have been digitized and made available to users for free.<\/p>\n

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\n\tTerms of the agreement were not disclosed, and neither side immediately responded to requests for more details on the settlement. The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major labels, said in a statement: \u201cThe parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe labels sued in August 2023, calling the Great 78 Project the \u201cwholesale theft of generations of music\u201d under the guise of historical preservation: \u201cThe Great 78 website is a massive, unauthorized, digital record store of recordings.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe Internet Archive fired back that its project was no such nefarious effort \u2013 and that it had \u201cpreserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhen people want to listen to music they go to Spotify,\u201d Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said in the statement at the time. \u201cWhen people want to study sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn\u2019t be conflict here.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tThough the lawsuit claimed that \u201chundreds of thousands\u201d of songs had been illegally copied, the labels specifically sued over 2,749 songs, including iconic tracks like Crosby\u2019s \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d and Sinatra\u2019s \u201cI\u2019ve Got the World on a String.\u201d They later added thousand more to the case.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the two years since the case was filed, it has chugged slowly along. In May 2024, a federal judge refused the Internet Archive\u2019s request to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing it to move into discovery and toward an eventual trial. Earlier this year, the non-profit accused the labels of \u201cgamesmanship,\u201d claiming they were \u201cstonewalling\u201d on key evidence and unfairly trying to add more songs to the case.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in April, the case was halted after the two sides said they had made \u201csignificant progress in settlement discussions.\u201d It has remained largely on ice ever since, leading to Monday\u2019s settlement notice.<\/p>\n


\"Billboard
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Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Concord have reached a settlement to end their lawsuit \u00a0against the Internet Archive over a project to digitize old vinyl records […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7874,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2223,6796,2222,1423,303,1463,448],"class_list":["post-7873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-archive","tag-digitizing","tag-internet","tag-labels","tag-lawsuit","tag-records","tag-settle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7873"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7873\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}