The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in a fight to lend out scanned ebooks without the approval of publishers. In a decision on Wednesday, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that permitting the Internet Archive’s digital library would “allow for widescale copying that deprives creators of compensation and diminishes the incentive to produce new works.”
The decision is another blow to the nonprofit in the Hachette v. Internet Archive case. In 2020, four major publishers — Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins — sued the Internet Archive over claims its digital library constitutes “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”
The Internet Archive has long offered a system called the Open Library, where users can “check out” digital scans of physical books. The library was based on a principle called controlled digital lending, where each loan corresponds to a physically purchased book held in a library — avoiding, in theory, a piracy claim. It’s a fundamentally different system from programs like OverDrive, where publishers sell limited-time licenses to ebooks on their own terms.
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People don’t see to understand what happened here.
The Open Library was a great tool designed specifically to let anyone access books without violating copyright. It was an elegant solution that allowed ohysical books that weren’t being used to be checked out digitally, and digital licenses to be loaned out from partner libraries, but kept track of the licenses so that it kept the 1:book/person limit.
During Covid, they intentionally disabled the systems that prevented multiple concurrent copies of a single license being used, and the publishers went along with it because national emergency, and because physical libraries were closed, so there were millions of unused books that were unavailable.
After the lockdown ended, the publishers asked the Internet Archive to return to the old system, and they refused to do it until they were sued.
They intentionally disabled the protections that kept everything legal, and when asked to stop doing illegal shit they refused. It’s absolutely their own fault.