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Illinois-based musician Anthony Martino is suing the Internet Archive for copyright infringement over its Myspace Dragon Hoard collection. This 490,000 MP3 collection was created from recordings that were lost in Myspace's 2019 server disaster. According to Martino, his music ended up in the collection without his authorization. Meanwhile, the Internet Archive denies wrongdoing and says it is protected by the DMCA safe harbor.
Through its non-profit organization, the Internet Archive (IA) aims to preserve digital history for generations to come.
The Archive’s popular Wayback Machine has archived decades of web history, and it also aims to preserve content directly: by scanning physical books or recording old gramophones, for example.
One of the more unique preservation projects centers around Myspace, which was the leading social network twenty years ago. The site was particularly popular among musicians, but today it’s a shell of its former self with virtually no new activity. In fact, quite a bit of content was permanently lost.
The Myspace Dragon Hoard
In March 2019, Myspace publicly announced that all music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015 had been wiped. As the result of a failed server migration, an estimated 50 million songs from 14 million artists were gone.
Days later, Internet Archive employee Jason Scott announced on X that some files may have been preserved. An anonymous academic group had mailed him a hard drive containing roughly 490,000 of those recordings, scraped from Myspace between 2008 and 2010.
“ANNOUNCING THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD, a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on Myspace, gathered before they were all ‘deleted’ by mistake,” Scott posted at the time.
The tweet
This collection was uploaded to archive.org and made available for free, allowing people to stream and download the music without any limits. In addition, an unnamed entity launched a companion site, lostmyspace.com, with a dedicated search and playback interface for the archived files.
‘Myspace Dragon Hoard’
With key historical data safely stored, the Myspace preservation effort was celebrated widely. However, not everyone was pleased.
Musician Sues Internet Archive
Two years ago, the Illinois-based musician Anthony Martino found out that several of his songs were part of the Myspace Dragon Hoard. These files were hosted by the Internet Archive without his permission and formed the basis of a legal challenge.
Last December, Martino filed a copyright infringement complaint in federal court. He argues that the recordings from his Myspace should not have been included to begin with, as he made these inaccessible to the public around 2011, long before Myspace lost the data.
An amended complaint, filed in January, accuses Internet Archive of copyright infringement, requesting the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 per work for willful infringement.
In addition to 11 works in the Myspace database, Martino also claims IA scanned and digitized his physical CD liner notes and printed lyrics, adding 48 additional works to the mix. This puts the (theoretical) maximum damages at $8,850,000.
However, in its answer, Internet Archive pointed out that potential damages should be reduced to the statutory minimum, as low as $200 per work, because any infringement was innocent. That would put the damages floor at roughly $11,800.
Internet Archive: We Didn’t Upload Anything
The Internet Archive vehemently disputes the copyright infringement claims. The organization explains that it was not directly involved in uploading the ‘Myspace Dragon Hoard’. IA notes that this was done by the anonymous academic researchers that were mentioned earlier.
“A group of academics that had saved some of the lost materials uploaded their archive onto the Internet Archive’s website,” the Archive’s attorney informed the court in a joint case management statement last week, noting that the organization is protected against third-party claims by the DMCA safe harbor.
IA does not see any outstanding issues and says that, to its understanding, all of Martino’s takedown DMCA requests were eventually processed.
In its formal answer to the complaint, Internet Archive also raises a notable counter-argument: it denies that any license Martino granted to Myspace by uploading his recordings was “fully and immediately revocable,” and denies that such a license prohibited distribution to third parties outside Myspace’s platform.
Martino, meanwhile, remains convinced that IA has a more active role. Among other things, he points to public statements by Scott himself describing his role in coordinating the collection’s upload.
To Trial
Since the case will move forward to trial, both parties will get the chance to conduct discovery to find evidence for their claims. The eventual trial date has not been scheduled yet, but both parties suggest planning it for April of 2027.
This is not the first music copyright dispute the Internet Archive is involved in. The organization was previously sued by several major music labels for digitizing gramophones. This case was settled confidentially last September.
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A copy of Martino’s amended complaint is available here (pdf). The Internet Archive’s answer can be found here (pdf), while the case management statement is here (pdf).
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