In 2023, the Internet Archive faced a $412 million copyright infringement lawsuit from record labels because of its “Great 78” project. Among a hefty 400,000 recordings so far in the archive, the project would have given the general public free access to 2,749  iconic pre-1972 tracks by artists like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong.

As MusicTech reported back when the dispute emerged, labels including Sony, UMG and Capitol together claimed that the Internet Archive’s streaming and distribution of these tracks was a breach of copyright.

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Yesterday, the Internet Archive announced that some progress had been made on the case: “As noted in the recent court filings in UMG Recordings, Inc. v. Internet Archive, both parties have advised the Court that the matter has been settled. The parties have reached a confidential resolution of all claims and will have no further public comment on this matter.”

According to the CourtListener document which comes with the statement, “certain settlement terms” are pending.

This is all part of a wider argument about intellectual property rights in the music industry. Great 78’s ambitions also ruffled the feathers of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), who told Rolling Stone in August 2023 that the Internet Archive’s “mass scale copying, streaming and distribution of the thousands of pre-1972 recordings identified in the complaint — all of which are commercially available on multiple legitimate streaming services – are blatant violations of those established rights.

“Just as Internet Archive’s supposed ‘emergency library’ of copyrighted books was recently ruled unlawful by a federal judge, its ‘Great 78’ project is yet another mass infringement scheme that has no basis in law,” it continued.

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