Musicians Tegan and Sara, Open Mike Eagle, Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and others organized by Fight for the Future want music labels to abandon their labels, the online library and the well-known nonprofit Wayback Machine.
“We, the undersigned artists, wholeheartedly oppose the record label’s unjustified lawsuit against the Internet Archive,” it read. “We do not believe that the Internet Archive should be destroyed on our behalf.” Instead, the book offers three other ways that musicians’ lives can be materially improved: By partnering with organizations like the Internet Archive to preserve original recordings and music culture, allowing musicians to keep 100 percent of sales and eliminating direct investment in streaming services like Spotify.
The advent of live streaming services has already made being a working artist less profitable, but as the book notes, things like that have become almost impossible to do without some kind of additional cost.
The original lawsuit filed by labels such as Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group was aimed specifically at the Internet Archive’s , which aims to preserve music recorded on 78 RPM records. The project has over 400,000 recordings available for streaming, including music from famous artists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Frank Sinatra. If the labels win their lawsuit, the Internet Archive could be on the hook for up to $621 million in damages for music streamed from the archive since 2006, .
Music is not the only front where the Internet Archive is fighting. The organization has recently been in ongoing court proceedings with publishers. The Internet Archive says that a digital library can lend eBooks under the fair use doctrine, but many judges now disagree.
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