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In 2023, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and a handful of other music labels filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive over the Great 78 Project, which sought to preserve and digitize 78 rpm shellac records. Now, both parties have announced in a filing that they have reached a settlement and that they’re filing to dismiss the lawsuit within 45 days. The plaintiffs said in the filing that they were “writ[ing] to advise this court that they have settled this matter.” They didn’t reveal the details of their agreement, and it’s very likely that they won’t be made public. In a blog post by the Internet Archive, it said they “have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.”
According to Ars Technica, the Internet Archive, its founder Brewster Kale and the project’s recording engineer George Blood were the last ones to agree on the settlement. The labels’ original lawsuit focused on 2,749 recordings by artists like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and Louis Armstrong. Some of the iconic tracks made available by the Great 78 Project included classics, such as White Christmas, Sing, Sing, Sing and The Christmas Song.
The labels argued in their lawsuit that the tracks “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed” since they’re already available through various music services. They then amended their lawsuit and added more recordings to the complaint, bringing the total to 4,142. If they didn’t settle and the court had sided with the labels, the Internet Archive could have been ordered to pay up to $150,000 per recording.
The Internet Archive previously lost a lawsuit filed by four US publishers led by the Hachette Book Group over its National Emergency Library project, which it launched during the pandemic. Under the project, it made 1.4 million ebooks, including copyrighted works, available to the public after the lockdowns closed the doors of libraries worldwide. It tried to appeal its loss, but the court sided with the publishers again and determined that its emergency library couldn’t operate under the fair use doctrine.
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