Publishers Battle Internet Archive Over Digital Library

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Major book publishers are pressing a judge to rule that an 11-year-old digital lending program established by the nonprofit Internet Archive infringes copyright. “Masquerading as a not-for-profit library, Internet Archive digitizes in-copyright print books on an industrial scale and distributes full-text digital bootlegs for free,” lawyers for Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House write in papers filed with US District Court Judge John Koeltl in the Southern District of New York. The companies are asking Koeltl to award them summary judgment in the legal battle. But the Internet Archive counters that its digital lending program doesn't infringe copyright, arguing the initiative is protected by fair use principles. “The Internet Archive and the hundreds of libraries and archives that support it are not pirates or thieves,” the nonprofit, represented by the digital rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues. “They are librarians, striving to serve their patrons online just as they have done for centuries in the brick-and-mortar world.” The arguments come in a dispute dating to June of 2020, when the publishers sued the Internet Archive for lending digital books over the web. Since 2011, the Internet Archive has been lending e-books through its “controlled lending program,” which involves loaning one digital copy at a time for each hard copy that's been scanned and digitized.


Publishers Battle Internet Archive Over Digital Library