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

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/03/music-labels-will-regret-coming-for-the-internet-archive-sound-historian-says/

by coloneltcb • 1 year ago

501 178 1 year ago

arstechnica.com

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

Institutions - especially those driven by profit - do not regret. If they did, an internet archival project would not trigger it when the likes of Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse could not.

dylan6042• 1 year ago

What does Cobain or Winehouse have to do with this? These individuals had issues well before record labels were involved in their life.

Prince turning himself into a symbol is much more emblematic of record labels controlling the lives of artists.

racl1012• 1 year ago

Agreed. Cobain, for example, just struggled with fame, drug issues, stomach pain, regardless of his dealings with the record labels.

Seems rather immaterial. Unless, of course, I'm missing something. Admittedly, I don't know much about him even though I'm a millennial. Seems like I should but I was more into post grunge music.

nonrandomstring2• 1 year ago

On the other hand, institutions from science and technology, wireless communications, radio and phonograph, made all of these recordings possible. Just sayin. So nil-nil at half-time for the argument against "bare" institutions? Or are you saying all "institutions" are inherently monstrous?

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

I didn't say they were monstrous.

I said they don't regret.

Now you can argue that's psychopathic, which is often synonymous with monstrous, but I wouldn't call them psychopathic, either, because a person is psychopathic. A group of people, an institution, cannot be.

Now, the systems that these institutions exist within are often heavily influenced by psychopaths looking to leverage situations for their own maximum benefit, often at the expense of other humans, but the institutions themselves, they're amoral.

qoez• 1 year ago

Bothers me generally that journalists anthropomorphize companies ("company X worried by...", "will regret..."). Companies are totally emotionless entities only living to maximize profit.

psychoslave• 1 year ago

And so is internet archive. And laws. And juristic institutions. There is no emotion or individual human interest in our fully rational processes, move along, you mere mortal.

NoMoreNicksLeft5• 1 year ago

that journalists anthropomorphize companies

Because companies are composed of individual tapeworms working towards a common goal?

Companies are totally emotionless entities

You speak as if they're evil spirits. They're made up of people. They're very emotional, you just get to see all the worst emotions manifesting at the most inappropriate times.

quickthrowman2• 1 year ago

Geffen didn’t shoot heroin into Kurt Cobain’s arm and Island Records didn’t pour a 1.75L of whiskey down Amy Winehouse’s throat every day.

Kurt and Amy did that to themselves.

FWIW, I am a former heroin addict and alcoholic.

If you want an actual honest take on what’s fucked up about the music industry, Steve Albini covers it well in this essay: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music

lenerdenator4• 1 year ago

They didn't, but at a certain point, one should realize that it's better for the artists (and thus, arguably, the long-term investment the label has made into their careers) to not have their problems made worse by commoditization.

DannyBee• 1 year ago

They clarify they mean they think they will regret it historically in the sense of losing that part of history, rather than monetarily, etc.

But to me this is like arguing a swarm of locusts are going to one day regret that they destroyed so many fields of crops.

dylan6042• 1 year ago

Doesn't the use of the word regret imply that they care?

quuxplusone• 1 year ago

Right, OP is saying (and I came here to agree) that the writer's use of the word "regret" was just clickbait — there's no actual regret predicted to take place except to music historians and the few ordinary people who know what they missed out on. Even the historian quoted says he's using the word "regret" metaphorically:

"They're going to regret it," Seubert predicted. "Not financially or anything, but just from a historical perspective."

Music execs are in the business of selling music. The less music is available in the wild, the better for them.

cheeseomlit• 1 year ago

Exactly, classic case of anthropomorphising a lawnmower. A thought like this would never occur to a record label exec

racl1012• 1 year ago

Highly doubt it. Seems far fetched for a soulless entity to care.

agentultra2• 1 year ago

You're right. They might regret it financially if they could plan past their next meal. In the case of locusts it results in their decline.

Music industry has been... not great with licensing and archives. There are recordings of Lightning Hopkins that only exist because of the Smithsonian Archives. And there are re-issues of that music today that only exist because of independent labels sourcing from those archives.

If the music industry had had its way they would have been done with Hopkins years ago and his music would have been forgotten, having moved on to the next crop.

Books are good at republishing. Film has been decent at it but suffer from licensing issues. Video games are probably the worst at archiving and maintaining access to libraries of prior art.

Locusts. Good analogy.

CuriouslyC• 1 year ago

In defense of video games, in a lot of cases technology has churned so much that it's prohibitive to maintain older games, and in general besides the 16 bit aesthetic people are so put off by the look of older games they tend not to get as engaged.

AI will improve this situation on the graphics side, perhaps with some sort of game container that emulates older environments well (Proton, anyone?) we'll see more re-releases.

ysofunny• 1 year ago

shout out for the house of the underdogs!

anybody else remember abandonware games??

wmil• 1 year ago

My favourite example of this is that for Babylon 5 the lawyers from Warner Bros insisted that the showrunners not retain any copies of the digital models because they were WB property and WB would archive them.

When they started working on B5 The Lost Tales, WB had lost all of the digital files.

yapyap• 1 year ago

Truly and authentically lost tales

walterbell• 1 year ago

It's sad when requests to official and unofficial archives are lost.

quitit• 1 year ago

This is also a common side effect of corporate policies that favour short term profits rather than retaining staff for the long term.

I see this scenario play out constantly:

1. A team or staff member has a project's data located on their user account or hardware.

2. The team or staff member are made redundant when there is a dip in earnings.

3. IT make a backup of the user account/s and wipe the hardware, and because it's older usually move it on.

4. Months or years later that data is needed and at this point no one at the company actually knows where the data is - and even if they find something, they don't know if that's the latest or the full version.

Now this wouldn't be a problem if there was a decent overlap in staff retention, but that simply isn't the case these days.

Writing better storage policies doesn't help - it's the understaffed nature of their businesses which mean that there is no time for staff to keep up with basic data housekeeping.

The types of data that clients should have on hand, but nevertheless have asked me to supply, are frankly embarrassing.

7thaccount2• 1 year ago

Someone also redid all the ships from scratch I think in modern software and has to get rid of it due to WB.

I still think B5 ships are some of the best in all of Scifi.

09thn34v• 1 year ago

first hn comment i've ever laughed at. lmao. well said

kjellsbells• 1 year ago

There are three types of loss: destruction, discoverability, and synthesis.

Destruction is the one most people think of. The last tape is destroyed, or someone nukes everything in S3. Policies normally save this from happening, bit not always. (I note that lawyers are pretty good at saving things because of discovery, so perhaps corporations should sue themselves more often /s)

Discoverability is when the data is there, but noone knows where it is. This is your classic corpo Sharepoint/teams/slack problem. There was a chat, once, with some shared files, from their onedrive, but the last person who remembered where was laid off a year ago and...well, that data is effectively lost. I dont think we have great solutions here except writing even more things down and hoping that everyone follows rules like keeping all files in one place

The last case is where the data is located, but noone can vouch for it any more. Internal wiki pages are notorious here. People post about, say, some sharp edge they uncovered, and the page sits there for all eternity. You discover it years later. Can you trust it? Is there anyone who knows why the page still exists? It blocks the synthesis of what you know with what the author knew.

6stringmerc• 1 year ago

Again I’m incredulous by the perspective shared by Ars Technica (often trumpeted by TechDirt) that “what is going on is not how copyright SHOULD work” while giving no reasonable consideration to how legally legitimate cases like this are from a standpoint are in US copyright cases.

I get the desire to FIX copyright in the US, I stand to benefit and so does society and creative progress. But these sensationalist writers are the lowest form of clickbait by simply taking a victimization position and digging in (re: TechDirt and Goldiblox absolutely being in the wrong for ripping off the Beastie Boys for a Super Bowl ad).

wavefunction• 1 year ago

700 million dollars in damages with no actual damages shown it's absolutely ridiculous

freejazz11• 1 year ago

That's not really a substantive analysis of the issue, which I agree with the OP that these articles never really address fully.

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

Right, but that's how a lawsuit works. You take the number it says in the book, multiply it by the number of allegations, and you get a number. You have to write this number down in your filing, then Ars Technica uses it for clickbait.

Murder 18 people and you can go to jail for 720 years. Doesn't mean squat. It's the 18 murders not the 720 years.

Likewise the $700 million number isn't important. What's important is the 400,000 copyright violations with no strategy, when even Lessig says you're gonna get sued and lose.

techsupporter• 1 year ago

I’m not sure what your criticism is?

Ars is reporting on a legal case and also on people who say they will be harmed by that case. The reporter then goes on to detail the policy work that groups are doing to try to change copyright laws in the country.

What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?

joshuaissac• 1 year ago

What else would you like to see? A legal analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the case?

Exactly.

What are the facts of the case according to the plaintiff? What are the points of law being relied on?

Does the IA dispute the plaintiff's version of the facts and the interpretation of the law? If so, what points are they disputing?

If there have been similar cases, how did those cases go, and how were they different to this case?

coliveira• 1 year ago

Until recently I'd say that the record labels accusations were unwarranted and they should stop. However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations and exploit the good will that started the project. An example is Open AI. Another example is how Google monetizes and monopolizes free and public information.

linuxhansl• 1 year ago

I fail to see what bearing the actions of other projects have on what the IA might or might not do.

So far the IA is providing an important service: Insuring the historical data is not lost. Until this actually changes there is no need to go after it, in fact it hurts us all.

freedomben• 1 year ago

Are you implying we should pre-emptively abandon support for IA now and let them die just in case at some point in the future they were to go evil?

bryanrasmussen• 1 year ago

However I've noticed that free projects have the tendency to become for profit corporations

I would say that for a non-profit project to become a for profit entity, legally speaking, is rare. I believe Google was always for profit? I welcome any statistics you have to back up the assertion.

tracker1• 1 year ago

So shut down a good org today, in favor of bad orgs today, because good org might be bad in the future?

kazinator2• 1 year ago

Labels will not regret recordings being lost, because it's just asshole executives who only care about money.

The hapless sound historian is just projecting his own bellyaches onto other people that are completely different from him.

pessimizer3• 1 year ago

Middle-class people are taught (,and teach each other, and repeat to themselves in their journals) that the only successful labor is labor that is loved.

For them, the heads of record labels have to care, because they are the most successful people in their industry, and they wouldn't be so successful unless they loved the work. In middle-class theology, becoming successful is a matter of loving harder than the guy next to you. It takes a lot of mind games to motivate people to extreme expertise in often very narrow specializations, especially when it's usually to make someone else rich.

sitkack5• 1 year ago

The CEO of HBO Max, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Zaslav destroys works of art to get tax handouts from the american people. Yes, American Tax Payers, pay David Zaslav money to destroy works of art already created.

kazinator2• 1 year ago

Interesting. I made a remark in my above comment which I ending up editing out, that if someone gave these execs a wad of cash for deleting something, they would.

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

Or, more nuanced: HBO pays artists and writers and electricians $50 million to make something. It turns out to be unmarketable. So rather than throw good money after bad, he writes it off. Then uses the tax savings to hire artists and writers and electricians to make a different thing.

It's wasteful and I don't like his decisions but it's not much different from what VCs do with their expenditures.

In neither case do American Tax Payers foot the bill.

Zaslav could write it off and still dump it on YouTube. And VCs could open source all the Ruby code they bought between 2006 and 2016. But there's reasons they don't.

bigtimesink• 1 year ago

Are you talking about Coyote Vs. Acme?

m4632• 1 year ago

He needs to be introduced to NFT art.

ilamont• 1 year ago

"The Internet Archive is not hurting the revenue of the recording industry at all," Seubert suggested, while noting that his opinions don't "mean squat" since he's not a lawyer. "It has no impact on their revenue." Instead, he suspects that labels' lawsuit is "somehow vindictive," because the labels perhaps "don't like the Internet Archive's way of pushing the envelope on copyright and fair use."

Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.

Lawsuits are huge, expensive headaches that force the plaintiffs to not only take a public stance on sensitive issues, but also force them to reveal details about their operations, communications, and business relationships. Like anyone else who goes through the trouble of pursuing a case on IP grounds, they feel their rights have been violated and they want redress.

They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.

dchichkov• 1 year ago

Just in case, here's the list of these labels:

- UMG Recordings, Inc.

- Capitol Records, LLC

- Concord Bicycle Assets, LLC

- CMGI Recorded Music Assets LLC

- Sony Music Entertainment

- Arista Music

Taken from: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/UMG-v...

lurk210• 1 year ago

I think his point is that the damages they are seeking are basically punitive, not related to actual losses that they have suffered. I doubt anyone is losing too much sleep over this issue, but the approach the record labels are taking seems like it is clearly intended to dissuade others from doing anything similar to what the Internet Archive is trying to do. The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.

freejazz11• 1 year ago

But that's exactly what the copyright act provides for... statutory damages not tied to the actual damages lost by the copyright owner, and they are only available in limited circumstances. And statutory damages still have to be tied to something tangible, like the lost license fee, and they do explicitly allow for a jury to add a punitive element.

The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.

How were those punitive as opposed to not? Should they have not sued at all and just let the infringers continue?

pessimizer3• 1 year ago

Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.
They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.

Part of the fight is sending messages. Almost all of the fight is sending messages, actually. It's lobbying government, arguing in the courts, lobbying people in general, and creating fear in people who would share their works.

"Somehow vindictive" is just anthropomorphizing. They want the most money. They think that these are the tactics that will bring them the most money. If letting everybody share freely made them more money, they'd do that.

throwawayyK0va2• 1 year ago

Just brainstorming a bit, if IA is gone, how can we lawsuit-proof that the next digital Library of Alexandria? Do we have the technology for this?

- IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?

- Can something like Chia help? I don't know about its privacy characteristics.

freejazz11• 1 year ago

Start might be not violating copyright law and staying within the boundaries of established fair use principles. IA is constantly trying to push the law on these issues, for better or worse, and putting the entirety of its operations at risk.

NoMoreNicksLeft5• 1 year ago

IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?

Silk Road is a good example of what will happen. Some media mogul will eventually cajole the government into acting. The government will go to the NSA, find the true identities of those responsible, then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one could ever notice. The US Attorney will prosecute, and claim that it's a felony because of economic benefit, even if no money was exchanged. The culprits will end up in supermax. They can't afford to do this to everyone, obviously, but they'll pick up to 100 or so of a mix of the worst offenders and the most casual users, to "set an example". The media will publicize it to the point of absurdity so the message sinks in.

SpaceManNabs2• 1 year ago

then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one could ever notice

In case people don't understand why the government can do this, it is called parallel construction and the SCOTUS deemed it constitutional.

Btw this comment is not me approving this behavior. And that last sentence was not a hint of me approving that behavior in secret :). Those last two sentences are a hint of what I think about the scotus on this topic though :)

throwawayyK0va2• 1 year ago

There are other countries in the world, in fact, that's where most of these digital libraries of Alexandria have been hosted. That's why I framed it as a technical question, because while any government may decide to combat it, it is unlikely that all of them will. Given the ongoing collapse of the US-led unipolar world order, the reach of US law enforcement will only shrink in the coming years.

TylerE5• 1 year ago

By not hiring dumb people who flagrantly and obviously violate the law.

dredmorbius2• 1 year ago

Appeasement has done nil against copyright absolutists.

boldlybold2• 1 year ago

Anna's Archive is on the path to this, for written works at least. The main idea is open source code + distributed data in torrents + anonymous contributors that are dedicated to the project.

https://annas-archive.li/blog

ed_mercer• 1 year ago

Also MAM

lurk210• 1 year ago

Some incredibly shallow takes in this thread, most of which seem to be coming from people who didn't even read the article. The quote in context:

"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."

This was not the central point of the article. He clearly is not saying that "the legal entity Capitol Records will manifest emotions and come to experience regret," but "the people who in aggregate comprise Capitol Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works," in the same way that a game developer on Hacker News might regret having added game-breaking DRM to a title he worked on twenty years ago, even though this allowed him to earn a lot of money.

pessimizer3• 1 year ago

"the people who in aggregate comprise Geffen Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works,"

Is this deep? What people in this thread are saying is that they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined, they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.

Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad. Nobody needs anyone to conjure fantasies of future schadenfreude over the regret of record execs. People need tactics and strategies to figure out how to stop this destruction.

rolandog• 1 year ago

I think it's good to publicly express our disapproval. Because — as we have sadly seen recently — there will always be a small group of apologists defending villains or systematic oppressors:

(It's worth also considering that the group size does not always correlate to its power or influence).

But you are totally correct that thought-terminating expressions of Schadenfreude towards those who exert harm are not enough.

lurk210• 1 year ago

What people in this thread are saying is that they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined, they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.

There are multiple users in this thread stating that the label is a corporate entity designed to maximize profit and that it thus cannot "feel" anything. This was obviously not what was being stated.

As to those claiming that these individuals won't regret what they have done: That may be true. But why does it happen with developers? Because it happens a lot.

Neither I nor Seubert made this claim out of some pseudo-religious self-reassurance that "One day, they'll all get theirs!" but as a simple observation that these actions are ill-advised. I don't know how you could read it any other way without being intentionally obtuse.

Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad.

What you're essentially saying here is: "Your observation was so obvious to me that it shouldn't have even been written down, because everyone already knew it." This is obnoxious and not in the spirit of the forum.

thayne• 1 year ago

Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad

The people filing this suit obviously do.

fragmede• 1 year ago

Are they? do you really think y'know what, reselling the cracked pirate copy of my game from 20 years ago that instead of my pristine version because I lost the source but I'm still making money, and that 20 years ago, fundamentally, it was really nice to be able to afford a roof over my head and provide for my wife and kids; You really think there's more than a passing feeling of regret?

freejazz11• 1 year ago

I agree with you, it's an absurd suggestion offered with zero reasoning.

lurk210• 1 year ago

DRM might have been a bad example, but it is one I've seen before. Another story I see here often is that a developer had an independent studio. The studio develops a game or an application. As the game or application ages, the developer sells it. The acquiring company goes defunct or discontinues the sale of the program some time later, and the developer wishes he would have just posted the source code for the program.

I get what you're saying in that the revealed preference is towards the "bad" behavior, but I think there is something to be said for the capacity to feel regret being a necessary precursor to discourage bad behavior from occurring in the future. The thread seems to be divided between those who believe the people working at these labels might have that capacity and those who believe that these people are essentially amoral monsters who are only concerned by the perverse vaguery of "maximizing returns."

xnzakg• 1 year ago

Something like this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37394665

nerdponx4• 1 year ago

It's wishful thinking. These people know what they're doing and won't regret it as they live out their days in comfort and luxury.

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

Internet Archive does not delete anything. Sometimes they leave the "item" (URL) up and block downloads. Recently they have started "darking" things en masse, which removes them from search results.

A sane solution would be to leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available. They do this for many items where you cannot download the mp3 yet the spectrogram (jpg image) remains available.

Archive.org is at a crossroads and the people who manage it have made some very curious decisions lately.

Miraste3• 1 year ago

leave the items up, block download of the full file, and make excerpts available.

This is what Google does with Google Books. I imagine the Internet Archive is trying to avoid it because Books is no longer a repository of works, it's a search index. If you find a source you'd like to read, you're on your own to find a copy. Large parts of their collection are out of print, and this can be very difficult.

It's still a useful tool with those limitations, certainly, but it's not an archive anymore.

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

An archive is typically restricted access to avoid just the sort of copyright problem we're seeing here. In the past, this meant having to visit the materials onsite -- even if you then just fired up a computer to look at them. Universities liked this for a few reasons, and it fit in with their typical gatekeeping nonsense as a bonus.

Exhibiting or publishing the work is different. Museums show tiny thumbnails (though this is finally changing) and libraries have their own rules, complete with weird little signs around the copy machines that people used to take more seriously. The lawsuit that set the rules for Google applies here. Yes, it sucks and it's annoying to tech people, but if the goal is preservation then it's obvious how things must be run. And what you can get away with while you wait for rights to expire or laws to change.

Providing excerpts to show what you have, then providing a way for qualified researchers to access the full work has been the tradition. Even for the 500,000+ books they had to take down due to the lawsuit, those remain available for people with print disabilities.

They even had an exemption for video games, but they forgot to renew the paperwork and the Librarian of Congress removed the exemption during the last triennial review. So we lost freedom there due to sloppy administration by Internet Archive.

m4632• 1 year ago

I think this is the real answer. They will probably still collect everything.

(they're gonna be sitting pretty in life + 75 years)

zellyn• 1 year ago

I'm very worried that IA has risked the parts of what they do that are fully legal, or unenforced (eg. abandonware), by going after targets guaranteed to make deep-pocketed pro-copyright industries like publishing and music labels come after them.

At this point, it seems like the sensible course of action would be to create a new entity that leaves still-in-copyright books and music alone, grabs a snapshot of the entire archive, hires everyone who used to work at IA, starts accepting donations so us supporters can switch over, and then picks up, letting IA declare bankruptcy and fall into the sun.

[Edited to add:] Don't get me wrong. I think the current copyright regime is complete nonsense, and I mostly support everything IA has done from an ethical point of view (except maybe giving away recent books for free), but I'm also a pragmatist, and the idea of IA's archive falling into the memory hole because of picking bad fights is distressing.

mountainb• 1 year ago

Brings to mind the line about the behavior of most organizations being best explained by it being controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

Just mass-violating the copyright of deep pocketed plaintiffs is like writing them checks that need to go through court first. The Constitution expressly gives Congress the power to make laws concerning copyright. Congress used that power. The statutes say what they say. There is no wriggling out of it; there are centuries of case law reconciling copyright with the 1A. If the IA is going to be provocative like this it should do so outside of the reach of the judgments of US courts.

TimorousBestie• 1 year ago

It would take a massive amount of labor to determine what in the existing archive is out of copyright in a legally verifiable manner.

There’s nothing keeping the record labels or other corporate copyright aggregators from declaring legal warfare on your hypothetical child organization.

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

Jason Scott and others all the way to the top have been saying "Just upload! We'll figure it out later!" for a decade. That turned out to be a bad strategy.

They're also infamous for ignoring DMCA requests. Requiring a driver's license or passport before they'll even talk to you. Then they leaked those, ugh.

Archiving stuff is Fair Use, but where's the fun in that, I guess. People should be able to upload things and say "Yes, this is a bootleg mix of a Prince song. Archive it but don't publish it, please."

A combination of bizarre policies and subverting their own DMCA protections is why they're in this mess. Again.

Musk showed up for lunch looking to vacuum things up. I hope that's not how this story ends. But it's starting to look like it.

TylerE5• 1 year ago

Yes, the recent history of the IA is of its shooting itself in the foot in full auto. I don’t understand how the board members pushing these obviously dangerous actions haven’t been turfed out.

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

They don't really have a board. It's just Brewster doing what he wants.

https://www.reddit.com/r/internetarchive/comments/1he3ml5/in...

p0w3n3d• 1 year ago

Internet was created to allow Library sharing and now companies try to stop the only library available from sharing books at one-person-at-a-time basis. This is similar.

We're doomed because whimsical companies will put down the IA and then forgot the toys they were playing with

Btw. What is age of music going into public domain? Still Disney's 123 years?

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

Sony and EMI worked with the Library of Congress on the National Jukebox a decade ago.

https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/about-this-...

Internet Archive is free to archive whatever they want. The problem is that they want to be a publisher too but refuse to follow the rules.

There are traditional rules around access to archives that keep things in balance. But when you're publishing the most popular song of all time and your strategy is "pops and scratches makes it Fair Use" when people ask to take it down -- well then you're going to lose. Again.

They could structure things so that these uploads would be protected under DMCA, and act more surgically, but they can't decide whether they're an archive, a library, or an activist organization. Each of those things has different expectations for longevity and different rules for survival.

At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane. Other organizations would step up to handle other aspects (Musk was down there looking to vacuum up the data). And if they chose to behave like a legitimate archive, they would have less of a problem partnering with rights holders and raising money from individuals and corporations who support preservation efforts.

Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated material and that's not a strategy.

freejazz11• 1 year ago

Not sure why this is being downvoted, it is pretty spot-on.

NoMoreNicksLeft5• 1 year ago

There are traditional rules

None of those rules are traditional. Those rules are adhoc, constantly changed at the whims of whoever is in charge of the copyright office in any given administration, and heavily lobbied by the media companies. These rules are many things: bureaucratic, official, overly-complicated, contrary to public interest, etc. but have no basis in "tradition".

At this point I'd be happy if they'd just pick a lane.

No doubt you'd be happy.

they would have less of a problem partnering with rights holders

These are the same rights holders that have acted irresponsibly when it suited them, leading to the wanton destruction of material that rightfully belongs to the public. You get that right? Copyright is not ownership, it's just a long-term lease... all copyright materials are in the long run property of the public domain. You don't get to destroy them just because you've got a temporary lease on it. The rights holders are the problem.

Right now they're asking for $17 donations next to pirated material

What piracy? Did someone hijack a ship at sea and hold its crew for ransom?

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

I work in the space and routinely access material that predates the Berne Convention. There are indeed traditions that archives and libraries follow going back centuries.

This is entirely separate from US copyright law and if we were actually conversing I'd imagine we'd discover that we share a lot of views there.

You don't get to destroy them just because you've got a temporary lease on it.

And that's where we disagree. For starters, nothing has gotten destroyed here. Yet. The problem as I see it is that some weird-ass white guy annointed himself keeper of the material. And now he's started behaving erratically and unlawfully, and putting everything at risk. Seems to be a lot of that going around lately.

Insiders at the Archive have gone as far as to say Brewster's sabotaging things since there's no plan for funding or running the thing after he passes. Getting sued over and over (and losing) is awful. And imagine how the employees feel -- scanning moldy books for 20 years and then your boss makes one weird decision and now nobody can see your work.

8bitsrule2• 1 year ago

I grew up listening to some ethnic 78 singles that my father had purchased. I managed to hold onto a couple of them (others were broken) but haven't owned a turntable I could play them on (good luck finding one, or the needles) for decades.

None of the singles had been released on vinyl ... it was clearly not in the interests of the industry's monopolists to do so. Because they showed up on IA (before the Great 78 project even started) I could finally listen to them again. To my knowledge none of them have ever been re-released.

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

Yup. They should've stuck to that stuff and not published Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby records along with the pile of priceless rarities that exist nowhere else.

They were politely asked three times to remove certain material and refused.

This is not the way an archive should act.

8bitsrule2• 1 year ago

I doubt that the Sinatra & Crosby performances on used shellacs ... along with surface noises and worn fidelity ... would be the performances that a few modern listeners would be attracted to. Most of those singles would have been valuable enough to re-perform and re-release on LPs.

It's pretty obvious that the value of those old performances could never be more than a very small percentage of $400M ... let alone $700M. Which strongly suggests that this game is about something else entirely.

calvinmorrison• 1 year ago

In 2008, Universal Media lost something like a half million original master recordings when a fire destroyed one of their storage buildings. The "Library at Alexandria" of 20th century music.

aerostable_slug2• 1 year ago

I'm guessing the rise of generative AI will help ensure this never happens again.

If you wanted to build a Sinatra Simulator, you'd want as many takes as possible to train it. For that reason, I imagine any and all high resolution recordings are now considered gold rather than something you just keep around for old times' sake, possible use in reissues, research, etc.

Even session background singers or isolated instrument tracks would be valuable; with all kinds of training data / not-samples, producers could add bits of Quentin Tarantino-esque pastiche to tracks easily -- "give me some background singers that sound like the ones in Smokey Robinson's first album..." "I want this bass track to sound like Duck Dunn playing a Hofner Beatle Bass..." Training data is what you need to make that happen, and record company vaults are the mines where that gold comes from.

NoMoreNicksLeft5• 1 year ago

Enemies of mankind. There are friendlier comic book supervillains.

eccentricwind• 1 year ago

The notion of those hyenas having morals in the first place is hilarious on its own

pmkary• 1 year ago

What a sad thing to read. Loosing. What will remain of the internet if even IA is destroyed the rich?

SpaceManNabs2• 1 year ago

Until now, I have always given authors the benefit of the doubt, and presented what they could have said to make their argument stronger.

I do this when hackernews is calling an article stupid and missing some of the salvageable or mostly correct things from the article, so I do some effort to highlight these kernels of truth that most articles have because most authors do have something of value to say.

For the first time on this account on this site... This article is hopelessly naive. Music label executives dgaf. If anything, they want the history gone so that they can charge extra premiums when they release 100 year old songs or for visits to their museums. It is like saying NFL owners regret people not being able to watch the first super bowl game and relive history.

Nah... that is stuff they could sell later if they figure out how.

Expecting music labels to have any sense of democratic music access is almost insulting to artists that have been often dicked by these labels.

Part of me thinks this article is a psyop to make music label executives seem more humane lol.

andy_ppp• 1 year ago

The music industry is essentially a bunch of psychopaths robbing artists blind.

jimnotgym• 1 year ago

For there to be damages, wouldn't you have to prove that you had lost out in some way? How could an unavailable record be affected by this?

badlibrarian19• 1 year ago

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

That huge number is merely what the plaintiffs write down by obligation when they file the case. It comes out of a book. The defense counters. The judge picks something reasonable. An appellate judge revises.

henearkr• 1 year ago

Ok, I just donated to IA. They seem to need support.

dartos• 1 year ago

Implying for-profit labels care about anything other than profit.

ikekkdcjkfke• 1 year ago

Labels remaster and loose old versions, youtube re-compresses old videos

Manheim• 1 year ago

The IA's work is essential for historians and archivists who depend on it for research and preservation. However, this is not a concern for the music industry or the major labels.

The argument that the industry's lawsuit against IA might ultimately harm its own interests—by jeopardizing valuable archival resources—rests on a misconception: that the industry cares about art and artists. It doesn’t. The industry's focus is shifting toward AI-generated music and hired musicians, prioritizing commercial output over artistic legacy. Their future is not tied to the past but to what comes next. In this scenario, history is not a resource—it’s competition.

alex1138• 1 year ago

https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

npodbielski• 1 year ago

Sooner or later we probably will suffer the event of lost knowledge similar to fire of Library of Alexandria but with internet.

At some point greedy corporations will come to conclusion that storing old data, movies, music, documents is just to costly. And just like that all of this will be just deleted.

nedt• 1 year ago

It's not just labels who aren't getting the artistic side of music. Copyright collectives are just as bad. If you give away your music for free under a license like the creative commons they will still collect money for any public use. But they will then just give it to their commercial artists probably even breaking nc clauses in open content licenses.

michaelcampbell• 1 year ago

People who work at Music Labels may regret what the previous generation of employees did to line their own pockets, and then do equally horrible things in their current context for the same reason.

exabrial• 1 year ago

psssh, thats a problem for the future. profits now

SuperSandro2000• 1 year ago

The greet of the music labels. They would likely not have made a penny of this because you can't even buy this stuff anymore!

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

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