Over 300 artists have signed a letter in support of the archive's efforts to preserve 78 rpm records
BY Kaelen BellPublished Dec 9, 2024
Tegan and Sara have joined over 300 other artists — Kathleen Hanna, Julia Holter, Cloud Nothings, Mary Lattimore and Open Mike Eagle among them — who have signed an open letter supporting the Internet Archive as it faces a $621 million USD copyright infringement lawsuit over its efforts to preserve 78 rpm records.
The letter was created by the digital advocacy group Fight for the Future, and it states that the signatories “wholeheartedly oppose” the lawsuit, which they say benefits “shareholder profits” more than artists.
It continues: “We don’t believe that the Internet Archive should be destroyed in our name. The biggest players of our industry clearly need better ideas for supporting us, the artists, and in this letter we are offering them.”
The lawsuit originally appeared last year, put forth by a handful of major music rights holders, led by Universal Music Group and Sony Music. Their suit claimed that the Internet Archive’s Great 78 Project — an effort to digitize hundreds of thousands of obsolete shellac discs produced between the 1890s and early 1950s — was actually just the “wholesale theft of generations of music,” and that the project’s goal of “preservation and research” was just a “smokescreen.”
So far, 400,000 recordings have been digitized, and you can listen to them through the Great 78 Project. However, the lawsuit is focused on a particular collection of around 4,000 recordings, mostly by legendary artists like Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Ella Fitzgerald. The maximum penalty sits at $150,000 per infringing incident, which means the lawsuit could potentially be worth over $621 million.
In a statement provided to Rolling Stone, Amanda Palmer said:
It’s an ironic gut punch to musicians and audiences alike to see that the Internet Archive could be destroyed in the name of protecting musicians. For decades, the Internet Archive has had the backs of creators of all kinds when no one else was there to protect us, making sure that old recordings, live shows, websites like MTV News, and diverse information and culture from all over the world had a place where they’d never, ever be erased, carving out a haven where all that creativity and storytelling was recognized as a critically valuable contribution to an important historic archive.
Other artists who signed the letter include Deerhoof, DIIV, Eve 6, Real Estate, Kimya Dawson, Speedy Ortiz, Spencer Tweedy, Ted Leo, Anjimile and more.
The full letter, and everyone who signed it, can be seen here.
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