A federal judge ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit filed against it by four book publishers, who decided that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them as a library.
Judge John G. Koeltl ruled that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works” and therefore would have needed permission from the books’ copyright holders, the publishers, before lending them out through their National Emergency Library program.
The Internet Archive says it will appeal. “Today’s lower court decision in Hachette vs. Internet Archive It’s a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve,” Chris Freeland, Director of Open Libraries at Internet Archive, write in a blog post. “This decision affects US libraries that rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons to books online. He hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it slows down access to information in the digital age, hurting all readers, everywhere.”
The two parties went to court on Monday, with HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House joining Hachette as plaintiffs.
In his ruling, Judge Koetl considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of fair use, which previously protected a digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014, among other users. Fair use considers whether the use of a copyrighted work is good for the public, how much it will affect the copyright owner, how much of the work has been copied, and whether the use has “transformed” something copyrighted. author in something new, among others. things.
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But Koetl wrote that any “presumed benefit” from the Internet Archive library “cannot outweigh the market damage to publishers,” declaring that “there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive’s] unauthorized copying and lending,” and that copying these books does not provide “criticism, comment, or information about them.” He notes that the use of Google Books was considered “transformational” because it created a searchable database rather than just posting copies of books on the Internet.
Koetl also rejected arguments that the Internet Archive could theoretically have helped publishers sell further copies of his books, saying there was no direct evidence and that it was “irrelevant” that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 “loan” e-books per day.
The lawsuit stemmed from the Internet Archive’s decision to release the “National Emergency Library” at the beginning of the covid pandemic, which allowed people to read 1.4 million digitized books without a waiting list. The Internet Archive’s Open Library program typically operates under a “controlled digital loan” (CDL) system where you can loan digitized copies of a book on an individual basis, but it has eliminated those waiting lists to offer easier access. to those books when pandemic stay-at-home orders hit. (CDL systems work differently than services like OverDrive, which can lend you publisher-licensed eBooks.) they were not happy over the Internet Archive’s choice, and the group of publishers sued the organization in June 2020. Later that month, the Archive shut down that program.
The Internet Archive says it will continue to act as a library in other ways, despite the decision. “This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books, including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for people with reading disabilities, data and text mining, e-book purchasing, and donation and continued book preservation,” Freeland writes.
