Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says

Labels push to spike cost of Internet Archive fight over old 78s.

See full article...

 

[Chuckstar]

Copyright covered digital archives at the time the record was pressed?

Copyright covers all forms of copying, including playing a record in a public performance. You don't get a pass because it's on a computer.

 

[Reaperman2]

We've long-since stopped caring about the Constitutional purpose of copyright (“to promote the progress of science and useful arts”) but this is a new low.

100% of the people involved in creating that music are dead, most of them for decades.

Fuck Sonny Bono. Life + 70 years for copyright isn't just unconstitutional; it's anti-constitutional.

 

[42Kodiak42]

You do realise that Hollywood would just wait 10 years and rip off popular authors books?

You say that like 10 years is a short period of time that you can just wait out.

 

[42Kodiak42]

We've long-since stopped caring about the Constitutional purpose of copyright (“to promote the progress of science and useful arts”) but this is a new low.

100% of the people involved in creating that music are dead, most of them for decades.

Fuck Sonny Bono. Life + 70 years for copyright isn't just unconstitutional; it's anti-constitutional.

The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

— United States Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8

Yeah, it's pretty obvious that "Life + 70 years" isn't there for the benefit of the author/inventor, it's solely to commoditize technological and commercial advancement.

I personally struggle to see any justification of copyright protection that exceeds 20 years from the date of publish

Within 2 decades is "Oh, this guy did this thing a while back" After 2 decades, it becomes "Check out this formative piece of cultural history!"

 

[Boskone]

Why stop at eliminating media as a multi-generational income generator. start a company? when you die, shut it down.

A business only generates income with continued production.

Media continues to generate income as long as there's demand an copyright, with no additional effort from the creator to update the book or whatever.

To some period the latter is necessary, but creating something once and generating income for a century or more is ridiculous.

 

[Koga Onutalepo]

A business only generates income with continued production.

Media continues to generate income as long as there's demand an copyright, with no additional effort from the creator to update the book or whatever.

To some period the latter is necessary, but creating something once and generating income for a century or more is ridiculous.

There's also the FUD lie trotted out by the corrupt that it's somehow impossible to sell a work that isn't protected by copyright.

 

[godel]

"They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective, the Internet Archive is valuable for all of us."

Financially is all they care about.

 

[JMTronicHobbyist]

"They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything

Uhh, do these companies give a shit about anything other than "financially"?

 

[Fritzr]

yeah preserving history is just a cover for your real reason which is… umm, infringing for fun? It’s pretty stupid to suggest their intentions are at fault here, this is what they do. It’s literally called the archive!

Heaven forbid someone might listen to a century old recording for free.

Listener's time is a fixed resource. Time spent listening to "free" recordings is a direct loss for those that seek to be paid before a recording can be heard.

Public domain and other non-revenue generating recording alternatives MUST be abolished, it is a net loss of revenue for the commercial recording industry. (industry opinion)

Computer game companies also fought this battle when they sought to completely ban distribution of abandoned games that were absorbing the limited time of gamers who were buying fewer new releases because they were "wasting time" playing low cost or free classics instead.

Publishers of print books also use this argument. Printing and distribution of public domain works and reprint of forgotten titles directly compete with new releases for the limited time of readers.

This competition causes publishers of print materials and computer games real losses in the form of reduced sales according to their copyright lawyers.

Archives that allow access to public domain and abandoned to rot old works without payment to the appropriate publishing industry are a thorn in the side of the industry and need to be banned outright (industry opinion)

Gutenberg.org is flying under the radar right now as they restrict access to public domain and copyright holder authorised works and do not advertise their collection.

Google Books is also careful to archive everything they can get their hands on, while only allowing full access to public domain and limited access according to license restrictions to licensed by copyright holder works. The current arrangement with Google Books is the result of an earlier series of lawsuits

The GOG project (Good Old Games) has reworked their archive & store several times in response to industry lawsuits.

Archive.org is the primary target today as they do grant access to material that remains under copyright that the copyright holder prefers to be gone and forgotten, usually for business purposes.

The publishing industry across the board is serious about protecting themselves in the competition for buyer's time. Anyone that threatens to promote public domain or works that publishers have decided will not be sold will be sued for the estimated losses due to lost sales caused by customers wasting time on free alternatives.

The commercial film archives are another example. As the commercial archive holds distribution rights, their collections see extremely limited availability that is governed by estimated profits on the release of anything they control (The Disney Vault is a prime example with their sales model of "buy it now, it won't be available again for 20 years!")

 

[Fritzr]

The industry has been imploding for decades and the RIAA & MPAA have become obsessed. The level of greed (artists excluded) is so high now that you can run crysis on it.

Your parenthetical is almost always correct. The artists earn their income from live performances and merch. The recording industry is mostly an advertising expense for artists.

 

[Fritzr]

You do realise that Hollywood would just wait 10 years and rip off popular authors books?

That was the original concept of US copyright. Reserve to the creator rights to publication and distribution for a LIMITED TIME for the purpose of promoting production of new works and inventions then release to the general public so that others can expand on, adapt, or otherwise create new work by standing on the shoulders of others. (Patents are limited time for the same reason. Give the inventor time to profit, then release it to all)

The purpose of copyright was already forgotten in the late 1800s when Samuel Clemens was lobbying for copyright to be extended to the life of his grandchildren so that they could relax and live on the income generated by his work long after his death.

 

[NowIsTheTimeOfMonsters]

I own some cylinders that are now too dirty or cracked to be playable. I'd love to hear the music on them from a place like IA and since I own the physical what really is the problem?

 

[Fritzr]

There's also the FUD lie trotted out by the corrupt that it's somehow impossible to sell a work that isn't protected by copyright.

The actual FUD line that caused copyright to be created in the first place, is "our work is being copied and sold with no compensation to us.". Which while correct was over compensated by the early attempts at creating a copyright law.

The same has been happening to modern copyright since 1885 when the Berne Convention started awarding copyright privileges to the descendants of the creator. (Minimum copyright for written works is life+50 years wherever the Berne Convention has been agreed to, audio, photographs, movies, and visual art have much shorter protection periods)

Theatre script piracy was a major problem for Shakespeare. It is also the reason many of his plays still exist as the original Shakespeare scripts are lost.

Johannes Gutenberg, the original publication pirate

 

[Marakai]

I fail to see how people who care about nothing but the price of the stock and to appease shareholders for the next coming quarter would regret anything that doesn't immediately contribute to that one and only goal.

 

[DaveG1960]

Absolutely ludicrous. How much money over the course of even 100 years could the labels "lose" without this lawsuit? My guess is much less than 10k US$.

The record labels need to stfu and do what they do best - eek as much money out of current artists as they can and leave the distant past where it belongs - in the archives.

One can only hope the judges in the case see this realistically from a practical standpoint and not from money hungry businesses.

 

[Koga Onutalepo]

Your parenthetical is almost always correct. The artists earn their income from live performances and merch. The recording industry is mostly an advertising expense for artists.

The recording industry is also the reason why streaming is accused of not paying enough.

 

[silverboy]

It would be nice if anyone weren't evil anymore. Speaking of companies and their fellow travelers in politics and whatnot.

To quote that old song, Where did all the good people go?

Uh-oh, I may have just violated a copyright!!!! But I can't stop....

Where did all the good people go?

...

Going, going, gone.....

 

[Bernardo Verda]

That was the original concept of US copyright. Reserve to the creator rights to publication and distribution for a LIMITED TIME for the purpose of promoting production of new works and inventions then release to the general public so that others can expand on, adapt, or otherwise create new work by standing on the shoulders of others. (Patents are limited time for the same reason. Give the inventor time to profit, then release it to all)

The purpose of copyright was already forgotten in the late 1800s when Samuel Clemens was lobbying for copyright to be extended to the life of his grandchildren so that they could relax and live on the income generated by his work long after his death.

And back then, copyrightable "content" had to be physically shipped, by sail, by rail, and by horse drawn carts. Copyright was only 14 years (renewable once, if the copyright holder considered the extension fee worth paying for).

But somehow, now that content can be shipped across the whole world in weeks or days (physically) or seconds (electronically) to the entire globe and billions of people -- rights-holders allegedly need over a century to wrest appropriate compensation for their endeavors (which these days seem more like 'gate-keeping' than 'investment').
If 14 to 28 years was good enough back then, how can an exclusive monopoly for ten times longer be justified?

The execution of the privileges granted by copyright (a.k.a. a government-granted, private, exclusive, artificial monopoly) seems to have diverged rather widely from the principles and reasonable compromises that are reflexively presumed to justify the existence of those privileges in the first place.

 

[Yarrum]

Sadly, the music labels never regret anything they do, no matter how stupid and counter-productive.

They could have made a lot of money by partnering with Napster, but destroyed it instead.

They could have created something like Spotify 20+ years ago. But they didn't, so someone else did, and now the artists and record companies are getting far less than they would if they owned it.

The major labels actually make a load of money from Streaming to get licenses Spotify were forced to give the labels equity in Spotify, pay massive upfront fees for catalogue access each time they need to sign a new contract, give them free advertising spots, handover 70% of their revenue, agree to pay out min. fee's if that 70% share wasn't enough for the label and adjust how the share of streams is calculated to suit the labels.

And on top of that all blame for artists struggling gets directed at Spotify instead of the labels where most of it should be.

 

[Cloudgazer]

They push back on labels' claims that commercially available Spotify streams are comparable to the Great 78 Project's digitized recordings, insisting that sound history can be lost when obscure recordings are controlled by rights holders who don't make them commercially available.

Ok - but all of these recordings are available commercially and if they weren't then the copyright law for pre-1972 recordings would mean that the IA would be golden.

This is a bad argument.

Well, I say that they'd be golden - they'd be golden if they had actually followed the law regarding non-commercial use of pre-72 recordings.

 

[GMcK de Cypress]

Is there a .torrent link to the entire Great 78 Project?

I’d guess that there’s too much for a single torrent, or even separate torrents per year of production.

If my math is correct, the Great 78 archive is currently at about 22 terabytes of uncompressed FLAC images, and counting. That’s more than four years of downloading over a 1 gigabit datalink, and maybe five years to listen to them all at 12 hours per day.

By the end of the project, all 3 million recordings should total about 165 TB.

DuckDuckGo’s AI assistant suggests that you shouldn’t have much trouble getting at 22 TB drive these days, with 60 TB drives available ”in the near future”. It would probably be more productive to make a contribution to the Internet Archive to help them find a legal jurisdiction with friendly copyright laws, and offer them help smuggling a box of drives there. The moon, maybe?

 

[Sky High]

Why not archive the sound recoding privately, make the scanned image of the record label available (there's a strong fair-use argument for that) and leave it at that? You don't need an archived item to be public in order for the preservation goal to be achieved. I don't understand the hill that the IA thinks they are defending.

What good is archiving culture if no one is able to enjoy that culture?

 

[Chuckstar]

What good is archiving culture if no one is able to enjoy that culture?

The stuff is… you know… archived?

As pointed out in the article, the items being sued over are not orphaned. They’re all available to listen to commercially.

 

[gridlach]

Industry Rule #4080 rears its ugly head again...

I compose scores for contemporary dance from time to time. I recently did a commission that samples vocals from Crazy Blues, a 1920 landmark recording in blues history that exists in its original, scratchy glory as part of the Great 78 Project. The vocals proved to be the main inspiration for the rest of the score.

The original 1920 song is firmly in the public domain at this point, but working from a commercially-available remaster would place a composer/arranger/remixer right back in copyright violation territory.

Making recordings that have passed into the public domain available in an archive doesn't just preserve history - it also opens the door to creative reuse and derivative work, a process that has been a cornerstone of innovation in music for the past 50 years at least. It's typical - and sad - that the major labels and publishing companies continue to see protecting their back catalogs as more important than making space for new work.

(I'm aware of the tactical argument that archive.org should have segmented its public domain project, but the absurd monetary damages that are being sought confirm that the industry is seeking to bankrupt the entire foundation, not just win a removal of certain infringing work.)

 

[Sky High]

The stuff is… you know… archived?

As pointed out in the article, the items being sued over are not orphaned. They’re all available to listen to commercially.

Again, whats the point of archiving culture if no one is able to enjoy it?

There is zero reason to archive culture if its just going to be locked away where no one can enjoy it.

And why should people have to pay for the music where the artists who created it are long dead?

All of the commercially available old music can just be removed by these private companies at a whim. Thats not good.

 

[Mattcintosh]

For the most part, you can barely give away a box of 78rpm records. I see them at estate sale, untouched with something like $10 for the full crate.

 

[SubWoofer2]

When are the RIAA and the MPAA going to just go ahead and merge into the MAFIAA?

You have this around the wrong way. Mob control of certain film, TV, and record industry companies is a long-standing thing. The front guys, brands, and alphabet industry associations can, through a certain lens, be viewed as a type of laundering.

 

[Chuckstar]

Again, whats the point of archiving culture if no one is able to enjoy it?

It’s stored somewhere. Do you not understand what an archive is? Or that copyright expires?

There is zero reason to archive culture if it’s just going to be locked away where no one can enjoy it.

No one is stopping anyone from enjoying non-orphaned music if it’s not on a free+public archive.

And why should people have to pay for the music where the artists who created it are long dead?

Because we have laws. If your point is just “let’s risk shutting down a big, public archive by having it blatantly flout laws”, then that’s a separate issue. But don’t pretend there’s some kid of “archive culture” principle at play that is different than just thinking one is entitled to free music because you want it. It’s entirely disingenuous.

All of the commercially available old music can just be removed by these private companies at a whim. Thats not good.

Which is what the archive is actually for, and why it makes sense to separate some kind of entitled “waaahhh, I want free music” from “let’s make sure this is saved somewhere”.

 

[Albino_Boo]

You say that like 10 years is a short period of time that you can just wait out.

Meanwhile in the real world, publishers will pay authors less money because there's less profit. The average author earns less than average pay. You will force people to stop writing books because they can't make a living. The only people who will benefit is other publishers who can then just print what they like without paying. Moral outrage doesn't change the balance sheet.

 

[noteonleaf]

Let see other way.
All citizen and companies in many way recieve something from their own country like subsidize, tax relief, protection etc etc.
So just put new law. Any copyright, trademark etc must given up small percentile of their work to charity as part of their social existences. Let say 2,5% (just arbitrary value of fairness).

So any public service and/or non profit entites can use this copyright, trademark materials for archiving. preserve, education, non profit performance etc etc

Just humble opinion.

 

[wastrel]

If the recording industry and their ilk had their way, museums and libraries would be a thing of the past--nothing may exist that they don't own and control, including all human art & culture...rather, all the rights to them.

 

[Albino_Boo]

Let see other way.
All citizen and companies in many way recieve something from their own country like subsidize, tax relief, protection etc etc.
So just put new law. Any copyright, trademark etc must given up small percentile of their work to charity as part of their social existences. Let say 2,5% (just arbitrary value of fairness).

So any public service and/or non profit entites can use this copyright, trademark materials for archiving. preserve, education, non profit performance etc etc

Just humble opinion.

You do realise that payroll and corporation tax exists?

 

[noteonleaf]

You do realise that payroll and corporation tax exists?

I do. Let's law maker define what necessary to do it. If you let them keep abusing law with their money. Then you now what happen next

 

[bennett_cg]

Sadly, the music labels never regret anything they do, no matter how stupid and counter-productive.

They could have made a lot of money by partnering with Napster, but destroyed it instead.

They could have created something like Spotify 20+ years ago. But they didn't, so someone else did, and now the artists and record companies are getting far less than they would if they owned it.

Sony BMG, Universal, Warner, EMI, and Merlin all took ownership stakes in Spotify collectively totalling about 18% in 2008

 

[bennett_cg]

No 78-RPM recording is commercially viable. Before disputing that, kindly go listen to a pre-1972 78 recording.

If the IA could countersue the labels and RIAA on behalf of the artists' estates for unpaid royalties, the CBA of this action by the labels would shut them up permanently

Edit to clarify: not a work that was copied to a 78, not works that ever appeared on a 78 - the actual playback of a work directly from the insect-resin disc. No one doing the "Pepsi Challenge" of sound recording is picking that over anything that came since

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

It's not like record labels are even good stewards of music. Just last night I watched a brief news segment about the emergence of Black punk rock, some of it predating the recognized "origin" of punk itself. One of the earliest bands, formed in 1971, was rejected by almost every label because their name was Death and the labels didn't think that would sell. Their 1975 album wasn't released until 2009.



It's taken almost fifty years for some of the actual albums from these groups to see the light of day beyond limited, unpromoted releases in local markets, held back by record companies not having faith in their commercial appeal.

Then we have well-known cases where labels completely dropped the ball even on popular acts. 90s alternative rock band Live had a song on their album they wanted to release as a single, but the record label refused because they thought it was never going to be a radio hit.

Live’s drummer, Chad Gracey, said when ‘Lightning Crashes’ was presented to record executives, the band was told the song would become a single “over their dead bodies”. Clocking in at about five-and-a-half minutes, the record label thought the song was too long. “Of course, it became probably the biggest hit from Live, and so it was ironic that I was told that, but yet the people chose that to be the biggest song,” said Kowalczyk.

Here's that song, in case anyone here needs a refresher (or introduction):



Just one story about executive meddling missing the boat. There are millions of other examples.

 

[Albino_Boo]

I do. Let's law maker define what necessary to do it. If you let them keep abusing law with their money. Then you now what happen next

So by reducing profits you reduce corporation tax to government. Great thinking. Self righteousness isn't an economic policy.

 

[kegemini]

Remember, folks, big commercial artistic interests are not at all in favor of preserving humanity's already-existing art, they are perversely incentivized to continuously destroy all previous culture so we have to keep buying new culture from them.

Yep. Publishing a copyrighted work unaltered should be a legal requirement for enforcing copyright claims. Ie. for every copyright claim the copyright holder should be legally required to show where and when the work was/is published and potential damages should be limited by that. Any period where the work was not published by the copyright holder should be ineligible for copyright enforcement and claims. If for some reason the work cannot be published by the copyright holder, then too bad - copyright law won't protect you.

 

[Cloudgazer]

Yep. Publishing a copyrighted work unaltered should be a legal requirement for enforcing copyright claims. Ie. for every copyright claim the copyright holder should be legally required to show where and when the work was/is published and potential damages should be limited by that. Any period where the work was not published by the copyright holder should be ineligible for copyright enforcement and claims. If for some reason the work cannot be published by the copyright holder, then too bad - copyright law won't protect you.

No damages means no copyright enforcement you say? Say goodbye to copyleft then.