Judge Rules Online Archive's Book Service Violated Copyright
1 - 2 min read
Mar 27, 2023
A federal judge has sided with four publishers who sued an online archive over its unauthorized scanning of millions of copyrighted works and offering them for free to the public. Judge John G. Koeltl of U.S. District Court in Manhattan ruled that the Internet Archive was producing “derivative” works that required permission of the copyright holder.
The Archive was not transforming the books in question into something new, but simply scanning them and lending them as ebooks from its web site.
“An ebook recast from a print book is a paradigmatic example of a derivative work,” Koeltl wrote.
The Archive, which announced it would appeal Friday's decision, has said its actions were protected by fair use laws and has long had a broader mission of making information widely available, a common factor in legal cases involving online copyright.
“Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products," Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle wrote in a blog post Friday. "For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society — owning, preserving, and lending books. This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”
In June 2020, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House sued in response to the Archive's National Emergency Library, a broad expansion of its ebook lending service begun in the early weeks of the pandemic, when many physical libraries and bookstores had shut down. The publishers sought action against the emergency library and the archive's older and more limited program, controlled digital lending (CDL). Works by Toni Morrison, J.D. Salinger and Terry Pratchett were among the copyrighted texts publishers cited as being made available.
