Internet Archive settles two-year lawsuit with record labels over music preservation program

The Internet Archive has survived another legal battle in its seemingly endless war to defend digital preservation in the face of copyright law. A settlement was filed on Monday in a lawsuit between music record labels and the Internet Archive, which the labels alleged committed copyright infringement with its “Great 78 Project” music preservation program.

The terms of the settlement and the amount haven’t been announced yet (and it’s likely the amount won’t be publicly revealed), but an order of dismissal for the case was also filed on Monday after the settlement. The Internet Archive team hasn’t said much, either, only offering a short update on its blog stating, “The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.”

It’s the end to a case that was originally filed back in 2023 and marks yet another clash between copyright protection and content preservation. The “Great 78 Project” at the heart of the case aimed to digitize and preserve 78 rpm shellac records, or “78s”, which were made roughly from 1898 through the 1950s.

They were basically the precursor to vinyl. So, this wasn’t modern music the Internet Archive was trying to copy; it was aging records that could be lost if their physical copies aren’t digitized and preserved.

The Great 78 Project was started back in 2017 and digitized some 400,000 records, including music by legends like Louis Armstrong and Frank Sinatra.

A group of record labels claimed in their original complaint that making digital recordings of that music publicly available for free was copyright infringement and resulted in financial loss, calling it “wholesale theft of generations of music” and describing the Internet Archive as “nothing more than mass infringers.”

At the time of writing, you can still browse digitized recordings for the Great 78 Project on the Internet Archive. Whether or not the project will be taken down as part of the settlement in this case remains to be seen.