Judge: Internet Archive's Ebook Lending Program Violates Publisher Copyrights

pcmag.com:

The Internet Archive's digital book lending feature infringes the copyrights of four major US book publishers, a District Court judge ruled last week.

The nonprofit is perhaps best known for its virtual Wayback Machine, but it's also long offered digital copies of scanned print books for free via archive.org and openlibrary.org.

Many of them are in the public domain, and therefore not legally protected, but some 3.6 million—including 33,000 titles owned by Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—are covered by valid copyrights, Reuters reports(Opens in a new window).

As such, libraries lending ebooks must pay a single fee to allow patrons to check out a digital copy, just as they would pay to acquire a physical tome. The Internet Archive, according to Judge John G. Koeltl's official ruling(Opens in a new window), "offers readers a different way to read ebooks online for free."

"IA's basic modus operandi is to acquire print books directly or indirectly, digitally scan them, and distribute the digital copies while retaining the print copies in storage," according to Koeltl, who argues that the publishers did not authorize the organization to create or distribute digital copies.

All four companies sued the Internet Archive in June 2020, alleging that its lending program—which expanded as the COVID-19 pandemic closed brick-and-mortar libraries—infringed the copyrights of 127 fiction and non-fiction books, from William Golding's Lord of the Flies and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye to Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and the Lemony Snicket series of young adult novels.

"IA does not dispute that it violated the publishers' reproduction rights," Koeltl says. "IA