Several major record labels and rights holders have settled their $621 million copyright infringement suit against the Internet Archive over its efforts to digitize, preserve, and share 78 rpm records.
Attorneys for both sides filed the joint notice of settlement in the California district court on Monday, Sept. 15. It states only that the various plaintiffs — led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment — and the Internet Archive “have settled this matter.” Terms of the settlement are still “pending,” and once they’re hashed out, both sides will file a stipulation to dismiss the case. That is expected to arrive within 45 days.
A post on the Internet Archive’s blog read only: “The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.”
A lawyer for the plaintiffs declined to comment. The Recording Industry Association of America did not immediately return a request for comment.
The focus of the lawsuit was the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project, which officially started in 2017 and aimed to digitize the shellac discs that were the dominant medium for recorded music from the 1890s until the 1940s and 1950s when vinyl arrived. With the help of audio preservationist George Blood (who was also named as a defendant in the suit), the Archive said it has digitized more than 400,000 of these old recordings.
As Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Rolling Stone last year, the point of the Great 78 Project wasn’t to just highlight the shellac discs that have become major collector’s items, but the vast array of recorded music released during the first half of the 20th century. “It’s the long tail that people wanted,” he said. “They wanted to know, ‘What did America sound like?’ We’re looking for not only the things people listened to, but the way they listened to it.”
When UMG, Sony, and the other plaintiffs sued the Archive in August 2023, their lawsuit focused on 2,749 of those recordings, most by prominent legacy acts like Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, and Frank Sinatra. (An amended complaint added 1,393 recordings, bringing the total to 4,142.) Because the statutory maximum for an incident of copyright infringement is $150,000 per recording, the possible damages in the suit could have been as high as $621 million
In digitizing these 78s and making them available to listen to for free, the labels said the Archive was effectively running an “illegal record store” with “preservation and research” used as a “smokescreen.” They further argued that the project “undermines the value” of the original recordings, and “displace[s]” authorized streams that actually generate royalties and revenue.
The Archive, meanwhile, has always billed itself as a research library (albeit a digital one), and its supporters saw the label’s suit — along with a similar one brought by book publishers — as an attack on preservation efforts and public access to the cultural record. They also argued that the Archive’s activities should be protected under carve-outs for libraries in the Copyright Act and the fair use doctrine, which allows for some use of copyrighted material if the purpose is deemed sufficiently “transformative” or “educational.”
It’s unclear if these arguments would have held up had the case gone to trial, though. Fair use failed to sway the lower courts in the book-publishers’ case, and an appeals court later held that the Archive “does not perform the traditional functions of a library.”
While the labels had the backing of wide swaths of the music industry, as well as the estates of many of the legacy acts whose recordings they were suing over, the Archive did find some support amongst the artist community. In late 2024, Kathleen Hanna, Tegan and Sara, and Amanda Palmer were among the 300-plus musicians to sign an open letter opposing the suit.
“We don’t believe that the Internet Archive should be destroyed in our name,” the letter read in part. “The biggest players of our industry clearly need better ideas for supporting us, the artists, and in this letter we are offering them.”
