A federal judge’s ruling for book publishers delivered a swift verdict that has significant implications for librarians, writers and limits of digital libraries.
(27 Mar 2023) On Friday, a federal judge in New York ruled that the Internet Archive violated U.S. copyright law when it digitized countless physical books from four major book publishers and offered them online. The highly anticipated verdict concerning the nonprofit’s behemoth online lending operation—3.6 million books protected by copyrights, including 33,000 of the publishers’ titles—was swift, landing days after the March 20 hearing.
In 2020, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Wiley sued the San Francisco–based Internet Archive over its National Emergency Library, which was created when physical libraries closed during COVID-19 lockdowns. During that period, the Internet Archive allowed visitors to its website unlimited access to digitized books it had scanned from print copies.
The publishers’ lawsuit had also targeted the Internet Archive’s Open Library for “willful mass copyright infringement” and a concept known as controlled digital lending, which it dubbed “an invented paradigm that is well outside of copyright law.” In controlled digital lending, a library with a print copy of a book digitizes it, holds back a print copy and lends the digitized version.
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