In June 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, John Wiley & Sons, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random Houseover their attempt to create a “National Emergency Library” by uploading countless e-books — or scanned versions of printed books — for users to “borrow” while bookstores and libraries across the nation were shuttered due to the pandemic.
“Its goal of creating digital copies of books and providing them to whomever wants to download them reflects a profound misunderstanding of the costs of creating books, a profound lack of respect for the many contributors involved in the publication process, and a profound disregard of the boundaries and balance of core copyright principles,” the publishers argued at the time.
Internet Archive countered that “as a library, the Internet Archive acquires books and lends them, as libraries have always done. This supports publishing, authors and readers. Publishers suing libraries for lending books, in this case protected digitized versions, and while schools and libraries are closed, is not in anyone’s interest.”
Nearly two years later, the lawsuit went before a U.S. District Court in Manhattan, where the judge ruled that Internet Archive was producing “derivative” works that required permission from the publishers as the copyright holders. “An ebook recast from a print book is a paradigmatic example of a derivative work,” Judge John G.
Literally hundreds of thousands of authors around the world supported the lawsuit. Might have been worth a mention. Nothing heroic about piracy.
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