Because here’s the truth nobody wants to admit:

Every settlement is about money.
Not truth. Not justice. Not art.

Money.

The record companies don’t care about your dusty old 78s. They don’t care about preservation. They don’t care about whether some kid in Berlin discovers Billie Holiday for the first time and has their life changed. They care about the ledger. About squeezing every last nickel out of a format that no longer even exists in the real world, except as cultural artifact.

And the Internet Archive?

They care too. About survival. About keeping the lights on and the lawsuits at bay. You think they wouldn’t have fought this in court if they had endless money to burn? They folded because lawyers bill by the hour and the music industry has deeper pockets than any nonprofit ever will.

This isn’t about “illegal record stores.” No one is streaming Ella Fitzgerald off the Archive instead of Spotify. This is about control. About the labels saying, “We own history. We decide how you access it. We decide what survives.”

Meanwhile, the music is dying. It’s literally locked in grooves that disintegrate a little more every time a needle touches them. But no, preservation is theft now. Access is piracy. Knowledge itself is contraband.

The labels call it “copyright.” But let’s stop dressing it up: it’s rent-seeking. It’s gatekeeping. It’s an industry clinging to relevance by making sure no one else can touch the vault.

And the Archive? They’ll move on, quietly. Keep scanning books until publishers come for them again. Because that’s the gig. You build something for humanity, and eventually someone shows up with a cease-and-desist and a calculator.

So yeah. Every private settlement is about money.

But every one of these cases?

They’re really about memory. Who controls it. Who owns it. Who gets to say what endures.

And that’s the part that should terrify you.

Here is the article.