Sony and other music record companies sued the Internet Archives for $372 million in damages
CTOnews.com, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) Sony and other top music record companies have sued the Internet Archives (Internet Archive), saying that publishing thousands of old songs and recordings online amounts to "wholesale theft" of copyrighted music, according to the Japan Times.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan on Friday, record company lawyers said the Internet Archives "blatantly infringed and stole hundreds of thousands of works by the great artists of the 20th century." The artists mentioned in the lawsuit include: Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk.
The company made a list of 2749 recordings in the lawsuit, including "White Christmas" by Bing Crosby. This is only a small sample of "unauthorized recordings released by Internet archives", according to the complaint.
They asked the court to order the archiving and deletion of all suspected infringing recordings and to pay compensation of up to $150000 for each infringing work, which would reach $372 million for the listed recordings (CTOnews.com Note: currently about 2.693 billion yuan).
It is reported that the Internet Archives is a non-profit digital library founded by Alexa founder Brewster Kali in 1996, which provides Internet multimedia document reading services. Its website maintains a large collection of digital text, video and music. The site claims to have released more than 400000 albums with the aim of preserving, studying and discovering 78RPM records.
