Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says

> "the people who in aggregate comprise Geffen Records will regret the role they played in restricting access to these works,"

Is this deep? What people in this thread are saying is that they won't regret nor remember it, and whatever comfort you're taking from thinking "in the end, after everything is ruined, they'll realize I was right" is cheap and lazy.

Nobody needs anybody to point out that the loss of music is bad. Nobody needs anyone to conjure fantasies of future schadenfreude over the regret of record execs. People need tactics and strategies to figure out how to stop this destruction.

Are they? do you really think y'know what, reselling the cracked pirate copy of my game from 20 years ago that instead of my pristine version because I lost the source but I'm still making money, and that 20 years ago, fundamentally, it was really nice to be able to afford a roof over my head and provide for my wife and kids; You really think there's more than a passing feeling of regret?

You're right. They might regret it financially if they could plan past their next meal. In the case of locusts it results in their decline.

Music industry has been... not great with licensing and archives. There are recordings of Lightning Hopkins that only exist because of the Smithsonian Archives. And there are re-issues of that music today that only exist because of independent labels sourcing from those archives.

If the music industry had had its way they would have been done with Hopkins years ago and his music would have been forgotten, having moved on to the next crop.

Books are good at republishing. Film has been decent at it but suffer from licensing issues. Video games are probably the worst at archiving and maintaining access to libraries of prior art.

Locusts. Good analogy.

Exactly, classic case of anthropomorphising a lawnmower. A thought like this would never occur to a record label exec

Highly doubt it. Seems far fetched for a soulless entity to care.

Doesn't the use of the word regret imply that they care?

Middle-class people are taught (,and teach each other, and repeat to themselves in their journals) that the only successful labor is labor that is loved.

For them, the heads of record labels have to care, because they are the most successful people in their industry, and they wouldn't be so successful unless they loved the work. In middle-class theology, becoming successful is a matter of loving harder than the guy next to you. It takes a lot of mind games to motivate people to extreme expertise in often very narrow specializations, especially when it's usually to make someone else rich.

What does Cobain or Winehouse have to do with this? These individuals had issues well before record labels were involved in their life.

Prince turning himself into a symbol is much more emblematic of record labels controlling the lives of artists.

Bothers me generally that journalists anthropomorphize companies ("company X worried by...", "will regret..."). Companies are totally emotionless entities only living to maximize profit.

On the other hand, institutions from science and technology, wireless communications, radio and phonograph, made all of these recordings possible. Just sayin. So nil-nil at half-time for the argument against "bare" institutions? Or are you saying all "institutions" are inherently monstrous?

Just in case, here's the list of these labels:

- UMG Recordings, Inc.

- Capitol Records, LLC

- Concord Bicycle Assets, LLC

- CMGI Recorded Music Assets LLC

- Sony Music Entertainment

- Arista Music

Taken from: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/UMG-v...

I think his point is that the damages they are seeking are basically punitive, not related to actual losses that they have suffered. I doubt anyone is losing too much sleep over this issue, but the approach the record labels are taking seems like it is clearly intended to dissuade others from doing anything similar to what the Internet Archive is trying to do. The RIAA has a track record of these kinds of punitive measures; think of the music piracy lawsuits they were filing in the mid-2000s.

> Record companies, artists and other rights holders are not pursuing lawsuits because they are "somehow vindictive" or want to send a message.

> They're also looking at this as part of a long-term fight over how IP gets used, just as the Internet Archive is.

Part of the fight is sending messages. Almost all of the fight is sending messages, actually. It's lobbying government, arguing in the courts, lobbying people in general, and creating fear in people who would share their works.

"Somehow vindictive" is just anthropomorphizing. They want the most money. They think that these are the tactics that will bring them the most money. If letting everybody share freely made them more money, they'd do that.

>IPFS over some type of dark net protocol?

Silk Road is a good example of what will happen. Some media mogul will eventually cajole the government into acting. The government will go to the NSA, find the true identities of those responsible, then cook up nonsense about how they gave away their identities due to some weird Stack Overflow question no one could ever notice. The US Attorney will prosecute, and claim that it's a felony because of economic benefit, even if no money was exchanged. The culprits will end up in supermax. They can't afford to do this to everyone, obviously, but they'll pick up to 100 or so of a mix of the worst offenders and the most casual users, to "set an example". The media will publicize it to the point of absurdity so the message sinks in.

Start might be not violating copyright law and staying within the boundaries of established fair use principles. IA is constantly trying to push the law on these issues, for better or worse, and putting the entirety of its operations at risk.