Sundry News: IA on 78 rpms and Florida Lawsuits
/Chris Freeland with the Internet Archive has announced that “More than 750 musicians have signed an open letter demanding that major recording labels drop their lawsuit against the Internet Archive for preserving 78rpm recordings.”
Fight for the Future is sharing this open letter, in which musicians oppose the music publishers in the lawsuit, saying “We don’t believe that the Internet Archive should be destroyed in our name.” They further call upon “record labels, streaming platforms, ticketing outlets, and venues to immediately align on the following goals”:
Protect our diverse music legacy
Invest in living, working musicians–not back catalogs or monopolies
Make streaming services pay fair compensation
In the name of corporate profit—and certainly not for protecting musicians, most of them making less than peanuts from streaming—the publishers are intent on unbalancing copyright. They have no interest in releasing these works. “‘Copyright law in the United States is intended to promote the progress of science and useful arts’, nonsense,” one can all but hear them saying, “we’d rather millions of recordings be lost to time than preserved, even though the IA project isn’t costing us revenue, just to make sure our money is always protected.” Roll over, Ebeneezer Scrooge. Christmas has a new and bigger holiday miser.
Douglas Soule of the Tallahassee Democrat reports “Citing tax dollars spent, judge urges Florida school district to settle book ban lawsuit.” Judge T. Kent Wetherell II (a Trump appointee, in case anyone thinks this is some liberal plot) recommends the Escambia School Board settle a suit brought by PenAmerica, Penguin Random House, and some brave parents because it “should be particularly important to (the school board) because it is spending taxpayer money to defend this suit and it could end up having to pay all or part of Plaintiffs’ attorney’s fees on top of its own attorneys’ fees if Plaintiffs prevail in this case.” They have also spent lots of public money on a separate suite involving “And Tango Makes Three.” If they lose, the school board could be out over a million dollars in attorney and court costs. But are they being reasonable? Of course not. They argue “Removing books is "government speech," meaning it's unrestricted by the First Amendment.” The judge rightly scoffs at that: "The Court simply fails to see how any reasonable person would view the contents of the school library (or any library for that matter) as the government’s endorsement of the views expressed in the books on the library’s shelves.” One wonders just how many of the county’s residents wants to see that much money fly away rather than being spent in the schools. Perhaps a radical few. Maybe those few should volunteer to pay the costs themselves. As for the school board, hey, go sit in an elementary school classroom. Maybe you’ll learn the concept of subtracting $1 million from your budget.
RF sometimes takes shots at PRH for their digital licensing costs. In this holiday season, we are glad to be able to say something nice about you, PRH.
Happy holidays to all who work for a better library digital content experience and for all who fight for digital preservation and the freedom to read freely. And lumps of coal to all who ban legitimate and important works and to those who would rather see works die even if preservation is not eating into corporate profits.