I’m not with rolling stone, but here’s some info.
The takedowns appear to have stopped (
), and there are a couple of releases that have cover art again. I don’t think the (main) purpose was ever to take down the cover art (which would explain why other sites, like Discogs, aren’t affected) and that CAA was just unfortunately caught up in a mass, overzealous takedown spree on the Internet Archive. I’m going to share some links to some queries, beware that they may take quite a while to load and they probably require an “admin” account on IA (which just means you have permissions to view more cool stuff).
There were two batches of takedowns on Garth Brooks CAA items, one in August of 2016, and one in April of 2018, see here, after which no more CAA items of Garth Brooks cover art were taken down. However, not limiting ourselves to CAA, takedowns on IA have continued until at least November of 2018 (see here), many for items which IA ripped themselves but provide with 30s samples only. No CAA items were included there, though.
Now, you may say “Yes but maybe there just weren’t any other CAA items for them to take down”, but there were: See here. That shows a handful of releases they appear to have missed previously, but also about 10 items which were uploaded before the last takedown spree in November of 2018. In general, since April of 2018, only 10 items were taken down, vs. 185 between 2014 and 2018, a steep decrease (see here). What gives?
Well, in August of 2018, a change was made to CAA items upon request of the IA, to exclude all CAA items from their public listings. This means that without having access to the item identifiers (or the right “admin” tools), you cannot find any CAA items on the IA. The only way to get to them is by going through MB.
What I suspect has happened in 2016 and 2018 is that Garth Brooks hired some copyright trolls who just ran a search query on IA (perhaps this one) and blanket claimed all matching items without doing the least bit of checking what those items actually were. Since the noindex
change, the CAA items aren’t included in those search results anymore.