CHATTER AWAY: Overnight Open Thread

Billboard Magazine reports:

Universal Music, Sony Music and Concord are suing the Internet Archive over a project to digitize old vinyl records from Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and other iconic artists, calling it “blatant” copyright infringement under a “smokescreen” of preservation.

In a complaint filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, the labels took aim at the Internet Archive’s “Great 78 Project,” in which thousands of physical records have been digitized and made available to users for free. They called the project “wholesale theft of generations of music.”

In a blog post on Monday, the Internet Archive said “we take this matter seriously and are currently reviewing the lawsuit with our legal counsel.” The group stressed that the Great 78 project had “preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium.”

Read the full article.