I doubt that the Sinatra & Crosby performances on used shellacs ... along with surface noises and worn fidelity ... would be the performances that a few modern listeners would be attracted to. Most of those singles would have been valuable enough to re-perform and re-release on LPs.

It's pretty obvious that the value of those old performances could never be more than a very small percentage of $400M ... let alone $700M. Which strongly suggests that this game is about something else entirely.

The value of the assets is free market. And obviously a few thousand dollars worth of crap, not millions. I know reputable archival organizations who routinely throw this stuff out as it's not even worth typing in a list of what it is.

However the penalty for re-publishing it without permission is fixed by statute. And, by legal definition, is exactly $621 million. That game played out in 1976 with the Copyright Act and the rules haven't changed. There were statutory damages in previous versions back to 1783, specified in Pounds because the dollar hadn't been invented yet.

I don't agree with much of that. But you can't just start putting stuff on the web without permission, either. You certainly can't put 400,000+ things on the web without permission then get surprised when a few people complain.

Why they didn't remove those few items and instead decided to pick a fight that puts everything else on the site -- including millions of items contributed by others as part of preservation activity -- shows poor judgement.

And it's billions of items if you want to consider the web page archive. But that thing is broken as hell due to technology mismanagement and padded stats so who knows what's really there.