\n<\/p>\n
\n\tSeveral major record labels and rights holders have settled their $621 million copyright infringement suit<\/a> against the Internet Archive over its efforts<\/a> to digitize, preserve, and share 78 rpm records.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAttorneys 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 \u2014 led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment \u2014 and the Internet Archive<\/a> \u201chave settled this matter.\u201d Terms of the settlement are still \u201cpending,\u201d and once they\u2019re hashed out, both sides will file a stipulation to dismiss the case. That is expected to arrive within 45 days.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA post on the Internet Archive\u2019s blog<\/a> read only: \u201cThe parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tA lawyer for the plaintiffs declined to comment. The Recording Industry Association of America did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n \n\tThe focus of the lawsuit<\/a> was the Internet Archive\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tAs Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle told Rolling Stone<\/em><\/a> last year, the point of the Great 78 Project wasn\u2019t to just highlight the shellac discs that have become major collector\u2019s items, but the vast array of recorded music released during the first half of the 20th century. \u201cIt\u2019s the long tail that people wanted,\u201d he said. \u201cThey wanted to know, \u2018What did America sound like?\u2019 We\u2019re looking for not only the things people listened to, but the way they listened to it.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhen 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<\/a> infringement is $150,000 per recording, the possible damages in the suit could have been as high as $621 million<\/p>\n