Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group and Concord have reached a settlement to end their lawsuit against the Internet Archive over a project to digitize old vinyl records from Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and other iconic artists.
In a motion filed Friday in Manhattan federal court, both sides say they have a deal to resolve litigation over the “Great 78 Project,” in which thousands of physical records have been digitized and made available to users for free.
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Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, and neither side immediately responded to requests for more details on the settlement. The Recording Industry Association of America, which represents the major labels, said in a statement: “The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.”
The labels sued in August 2023, calling the Great 78 Project the “wholesale theft of generations of music” under the guise of historical preservation: “The Great 78 website is a massive, unauthorized, digital record store of recordings.”
The Internet Archive fired back that its project was no such nefarious effort – and that it had “preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium.”
“When people want to listen to music they go to Spotify,” Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said in the statement at the time. “When people want to study sound recordings as they were originally created, they go to libraries like the Internet Archive. Both are needed. There shouldn’t be conflict here.”
Though the lawsuit claimed that “hundreds of thousands” of songs had been illegally copied, the labels specifically sued over 2,749 songs, including iconic tracks like Crosby’s “White Christmas” and Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.” They later added thousand more to the case.
In the two years since the case was filed, it has chugged slowly along. In May 2024, a federal judge refused the Internet Archive’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, allowing it to move into discovery and toward an eventual trial. Earlier this year, the non-profit accused the labels of “gamesmanship,” claiming they were “stonewalling” on key evidence and unfairly trying to add more songs to the case.
But in April, the case was halted after the two sides said they had made “significant progress in settlement discussions.” It has remained largely on ice ever since, leading to Monday’s settlement notice.
