Music labels sue Internet Archive over digitized record collection - Yiffit.net
yiffit.net
Archived version: https://archive.ph/ZGo6X [https://archive.ph/ZGo6X] Universal Music Group (UMG.AS [http://UMG.AS]), Sony Music Entertainment (6758.T) and other record labels on Friday sued the nonprofit Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its streaming collection of digitized music from vintage records. The labels’ lawsuit filed in a federal court in Manhattan said the Archive’s “Great 78 Project” functions as an “illegal record store” for songs by musicians including Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. They named 2,749 sound-recording copyrights that the Archive allegedly infringed. The labels said their damages in the case could be as high as $412 million. Representatives for the Internet Archive did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the complaint. The San Francisco-based Internet Archive digitally archives websites, books, audio recordings and other materials. It compares itself to a library and says its mission is to “provide universal access to all knowledge.” The Internet Archive is already facing another federal lawsuit in Manhattan from leading book publishers who said its digital-book lending program launched in the pandemic violates their copyrights. A judge ruled for the publishers in March, in a decision that the Archive plans to appeal. The Great 78 Project encourages donations of 78-rpm records – the dominant record format from the early 1900s until the 1950s – for the group to digitize to “ensure the survival of these cultural materials for future generations to study and enjoy.” Its website says the collection includes more than 400,000 recordings. The labels’ lawsuit said the project includes thousands of their copyright-protected recordings, including Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas,” Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” and Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)”. The lawsuit said the recordings are all available on authorized streaming services and “face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.”

See linked posting. I’ve commented there with a link to a CLI tool in Python that allows downloading of IA collections. I’ve submitted a patch to enable specifying start and end points so that it’s easier to resume downloading a huge collection, or to allow multiple people to split up the work.

https://archive.org/details/georgeblood

https://archive.org/details/78rpm_bowling_green

F*ck the RIAA and absurdly long copyright.

EDIT: There is more than one collection of 78s on IA, so I updated the title.

The issue with these collections are that they’re absolutely HUGE. And yes, IA offers torrents for them, but as a separate torrent for every. single. album. And the torrents have all data in them – FLAC, fixed-rate MP3, VBR MP3, PDF liner notes, etc. etc… there may be some extremely hardcore data-hoarders out there who want everything, but IMHO as these are scratchy old 78 records, FLAC is overkill to just save the audio in a listenable format. The George Blood collection, just the VBR MP3s, is looking to be about 6TB. With ALL data it might be over 40TB! I can’t afford that many hard drives :)

So, my approach at the moment is to save just the VBR MP3s (they seem to be done at up to 320kbps VBR) and the JPEG album cover. If I have a chance and any storage left afterwards, I can make a separate pass to get the album liner PDFs…

Tool used: https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive

Patch to allow setting start and end item indices for downloads: https://github.com/jjjake/internetarchive/pull/605

Example usage to grab just the VBR MP3 and record label JPG for each (note the --start-idx and --end-idx arguments):

#ia download --start-idx=4001 --end-idx=8000 -a -i --format="VBR MP3" --format="JPEG" --search collection:georgeblood

I’m going to concentrate on the George Blood collection for now… I’m starting at item 1. It would be great if others started at index 50,000, 100,000, 150,000, … and others started at the end and worked backwards in similarly-sized chunks, so that it’s assured someone gets each of them.

    • ArghblargOPEnglish
      331·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, you’re right, Fuck em.

      FYI I’m currently on 4001-8000 of the ‘Great 78 Collection’. Looks like I’ll need about 6TB to get it all, yikes! (Just the VBR MP3 files, not the FLACs. Holy Hell.)

      collection:georgeblood

      https://archive.org/details/georgeblood

      If everyone would take blocks of it, say 4000 each, we can eventually create torrents for each one or something so it can all be reassembled if/when the IA has to take it down.

        • ArghblargOPEnglish
          51·
          1 year ago

          I wish the IA would offer a torrents of the overall collection but it’s over 400k separate torrents, one for each album. And they contain FLACs, fixed- and VBR MP3s, PDF jacket notes, JPGs … it’s just too much for one person (I am OK with buying an 8TB drive or two, but not a dozen!)

          I’m trying to at least grab the VBR MP3s (these are old scratchy records after all… I don’t know how much FLAC will really preserve). Maybe if I can get most of those, I’ll do a second pass and get the album cover JPGs, then liner PDFs… depending on if/how long the collection stays up.

        • ArghblargOPEnglish
          41·
          1 year ago

          Normally I would just fetch the torrent, yes, but this particular collection is huge – over 400k separate items (which on IA be their own torrents). Is there a way to get an aggregate, but filtered, torrent with just, say, the album jpg and VBR mp3 files for each? I don’t think I can afford the entire collection as each also has the FLACs.

        • ArghblargOPEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          around 5500… gonna take a while. My ISP says there’s no monthly cap but I wonder if I really should dl this much…