Sony Music Entertainment and five other major music companies sued the nonprofit Internet Archive, saying that its posting of thousands of old songs and recordings online amounts to “wholesale theft” of copyright-protected music.
The Internet Archive’s “blatant infringement includes hundreds of thousands of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century,” lawyers for the record companies said in a lawsuit filed Friday in Manhattan federal court. Among the artists cited: Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk.
The companies include a list of 2,749 recordings in the lawsuit, including Bing Crosby singing White Christmas,” that “is but a small sample” of recordings the archive posted without permission, according to the complaint. They are asking the court to order the archive to remove all copyrighted material and pay damages of as much as $150,000 for each infringed work, which for the listed recordings would amount to $372 million.
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