The non-profit digital library Internet Archive, best known for its web archival service the Wayback Machine, released an open letter on April 15 to various record labels under the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), urging them to drop the $700 million UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive lawsuit. The open letter was launched through a Change.org petition with individuals encouraged to add their signature to the letter; the letter has acquired over 75,000 signatures at the time of publication.
The lawsuit dates back to Aug. 11, 2023, when record labels with the RIAA, including Universal Music Group, Sony Music, Concord and Capital Records, filed a complaint against the Internet Archive over their Great 78 Project for alleged copyright infringement.
The Great 78 Project, which began over seven years before 2025, is the Internet Archive’s community initiative to gather, digitize and preserve the audio of 78 revolutions per minute (RPM) flat discs from 1898 to the late 1950s. Recordings uploaded to the Great 78 Project include: Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Frank Sinatra’s “Young at Heart” and “Saturday Night (is the Loneliest Night of the Week),” Louis Armstrong and His Hot Sevens’ “Potato Head Blues” and Thelonius Monk’s “Monk’s Dream;” as cited by the record labels in their original complaint.
In the record labels’ complaints, they accuse the Great 78 Project of unauthorized reproduction and distribution of over 4,000 of the record labels’ audio recordings in an effort to solicit donations for the Internet Archive, acting in violation of the 2018 Music Modernization Act.
“Internet Archive actively uses the music it offers as part of the Great 78 Project to attract new visitors from whom it can solicit donations,” the amended complaint reads. “When the Music Modernization Act’s enactment made clear that unauthorized copying, streaming, and distributing pre-1972 sound recordings is infringing … Internet Archive ignored the new law and plowed forward as if the Music Modernization Act had never been enacted.”
The Internet Archive responds that the RIAA has provided insufficient evidence of ownership of the records in question.
“Plaintiffs must actually prove their ownership of each of these works — they cannot rely, as plaintiffs in copyright cases usually can, on the rebuttable presumption of ownership created by a copyright registration,” the response reads. “And because it is Plaintiffs’ burden to establish ownership, it is also their burden to establish that they hold the exclusive right to reproduce each of the works at issue under the relevant state law.”
Both parties filed a stay on the case that was ordered April 4, hoping to continue settlement discussions that could lead to the case’s dismissal. It is uncertain the connection between the settlement discussions and the Internet Archive’s following open letter that month.
If a resolution is not made; otherwise, the record labels in their amended complaint demand compensation for losses and Internet Archive profits from the Great 78 Project that will be enumerated in a later trial, or $150,000 in statutory damages for every audio recording infringed. Totalling around $700 million in statutory damages, the Internet Archive claims in their open letter that the judgement “threatens the very existence of the Internet Archive, including the Wayback Machine …”
“While I’m not super ‘for’ or ‘against’ in all things in this matter, I do think that preserving stuff in an easily accessible way is very important. What I’m seeing with the record label lawsuit, I’m not understanding how this is any big loss to them. To me, the scope of it is just way too wide,” said Lena Zaghmouri, a Delta librarian who archives video recordings for Delta.
The Internet Archive’s recent open letter comes after the “Save Music, Save the Archive!” petition, launched in early December last year by the non-profit advocacy group Fight for the Future. The petition called for musicians to oppose the record labels suing the Internet Archive in their open letter, collecting signatures from over 850 musicians after musician sign-ons had closed.
“While those guided by emotion may side with the Internet Archive, the law will likely favor the recording industry,” said John Villec, an adjunct music instructor and a member of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, a nonprofit performing rights organization that supported the enactment of the 2018 Music Modernization Act.
Until last year, UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive had also coincided with another copyright infringement lawsuit against the archive. Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive was a case in which various book publishers sued the Internet Archive for its implementation of their National Emergency Library service during the COVID-19 lockdown, lasting from June 1, 2020 to Sept. 4, 2024 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denied the Internet Archive’s appeal and claim to fair use in the lawsuit.
“I do think the Internet Archive, they do seem to have learned from what happened with Hachette. They were even digitizing stuff that wouldn’t have been available electronically through the publishers, so they were sort of like duplicating work that the publisher did and cutting into their profits that way. I don’t see the same thing that’s happening with the music … The CD’s we have here in the library. Those don’t get checked out anymore because it’s hard to find even a CD player,” said Zaghmouri. “So it’s not something that’s as freely available as like a book you can check out at the library.”
Earlier the month of the Internet Archive’s recent open letter, the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency terminated 1,435 federal grants awarded by the National Endowment of the Humanities, according to a database compiled by the professional society Association for Computers and the Humanities. One of those grants was the “Increasing Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections” grant, which had awarded $345,896 to the Internet Archive before its termination.
Editor’s note: An abbreviated version of this story ran in the May 6 print issue of The Collegian.
