Education
Publishers are suing Internet Archive via ebook lending to the Digital Library
The Internet Archive has been sued by four major book publishers for copyright infringement of the Open Library initiative, setting the foundation for a potential court battle for one of the internet's longest-term ebook collections.
Launched in 2006, the Open Library of the Internet Archive enables users to borrow ebooks scanned from physical copies, according to a theory called 'controlled digital lending.' The initiative expanded in March when the National Emergency Library was launched, which scrapped waitlists as a reaction to the global pandemic and immediately made all scanned books available to everyone with an account.
The project effectively bypasses the traditional limitations on licensing used by conventional libraries. Open Library ebooks are downloaded from paper copies instead of digitally bought, and the project never reaches a licensing agreement with the publisher.
Nevertheless, the four editors – Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley and Harper Collins – consider the project as a whole to be a gross breach of copyright. 'Scans printed books, uploads these illegal scanned books to their servers and distributes digital verbatim copies of the books entirely on publicly-facing websites, without any license or payment to the authors or publishers.'
"Any Internet user with just a few clicks is able to download complete digital copies of [the] defendant's in-copyright books.
This is a complaint of many years from the publishers and the groups of authors. An official letter raising similar concerns was circulated by the Authors Guild in April. "You are cloaking behind the pretense that you are giving magnanimous access to books, your illegal scans and distribution," the letter reads. "But clearly cheating is giving away what's not yours, and nothing magnanimous."
Named the case "deceitful" for comment, the founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle.
"The Internet Archive, as libraries have always done, is buying and lending books to the Internet, as a library," Kahle said at the Verge. "Publishing and writers and readers are sponsored. Publishers suing book loans libraries — protected digital releases in this case, and while schools and libraries are closed — are not interested in anyone.'
He added, "We hope this can be resolved rapidly.
