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Sony Music Entertainment is miffed that music recorded by Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby singing” White Christmas,” are being posted online for free in what

they are claiming is “wholesale theft” of copyright-protected music. Sony and five other major music companies have sued the non-profit Internet Archive, saying that its posting of thousands

of old songs and recordings is theft and what they are doing is “blatant infringement. The Internet Archive maintains a large collection of digital text, video and music online. Under the

auspices of their Great 78 Project website, it posts digitized copies, which it solicits from users, of records in the antiquated 78 LP format. It boasts of having posted more than 400,000

recordings and that its purpose is “the preservation, research and discovery of 78rpm records.” But the record companies says the archive’s altruistic claims are a ”smokescreen” to disguise

its theft. The Internet Archive’s “blatant infringement includes hundreds of thousands of works by some of the greatest artists of the Twentieth Century,” lawyers for the record companies

said in a lawsuit filed at the weekend in a Manhattan federal court. The companies include a list of 2749 recordings in the lawsuit, including Bing Crosby singing” White Christmas,” that “is

but a small sample” of recordings the archive posted without permission, according to the complaint. They are asking the court to order the archive to remove all copyrighted material and

pay damages of as much as $150,000 for each infringed work, which for the listed recordings would amount to $372 million. The recordings “are already available for streaming or downloading

from numerous services” authorized by the record companies, the lawyers for the record companies wrote. “These recordings face no danger of being lost, forgotten, or destroyed.” In 2018,

Congress passed the Music Modernization Act that extended the copyright for pre1972 music to 2067. About Post Author David Richards David Richards has been writing about technology for more

than 30 years. A former Fleet Street journalist, he wrote the Award Winning Series on the Federated Ships Painters + Dockers Union for the Bulletin that led to a Royal Commission. He is also

a Logie Winner for Outstanding Contribution To TV Journalism with a story called The Werribee Affair. In 1997, he built the largest Australian technology media company and prior to that the

third largest PR company that became the foundation company for Ogilvy PR. Today he writes about technology and the impact on both business and consumers.