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By Nate Raymond and Blake Brittain
(Reuters) – A U.S. judge ruled on Friday that an online library operated by the nonprofit Internet Archive had infringed the copyrights of four major U.S. publishers by lending digitally scanned copies of the books.
The ruling by US District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan came in a closely watched lawsuit that tested the Internet Archive’s ability to freely lend out the works of writers and publishers who remained protected by copyright laws. US copyright
The San Francisco-based nonprofit has over the past decade scanned millions of print books and loaned out the resulting digital copies for free. While many are in the public domain, 3.6 million are protected by valid copyright.
That includes 33,000 titles belonging to the four publishers, Lagardere SCA’s Hachette Book Group, News Corp’s HarperCollins Publishers (NASDAQ:), John Wiley & Sons Inc and Bertelsmann SE & Co.’s Penguin Random House.
They sued in 2020 over 127 books, after the Internet Archive expanded lending with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when physical libraries were forced to close, by removing limits on how many people could borrow a book at a time. time. .
The nonprofit, which partners with traditional libraries, has since returned to what it calls “controlled digital lending.”
It argued that its practices were protected by the “fair use” doctrine, which allows unlicensed use of the copyrighted works of others in some circumstances.
But Koeltl said there was nothing “transformational” about the Internet Archive’s digital book copies that would warrant “fair use” protection, as his e-books simply replaced the licensed copies that publishers themselves give to traditional libraries.
“While IA has the right to lend out printed books that it legally acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend out the digital copies en masse,” he wrote.
The Internet Archive in a statement promised an appeal, saying the ruling “holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.”
Maria Pallante, director of the American Publishers Association, said in a statement that the ruling “underscores the importance of authors, publishers and creative markets in a global society.”
