Nuked Hey followers! I’m Nuked and I’m here to talk about the recent court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive, a lawsuit brought by four book publishers against the Internet Archive. This lawsuit was about the website’s right to scan books and lend them out like a library.
Judge John G. Koeltl ultimately decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create “derivative works,” and so would have needed authorization from the books’ copyright holders — the publishers — before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program.
The Internet Archive said it will appeal this decision, as it was a blow to all libraries and the communities they serve. Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive, wrote in a blog post that it hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online and it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.
The judge considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of Fair Use, which previously protected a digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014. However, he dismissed all of the IA’s Fair Use arguments. He wrote that any “alleged benefits” from the Internet Archive’s library “cannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers,” declared that “there is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive’s] copying and unauthorized lending,” and that copying these books doesn’t provide “criticism, commentary, or information about them.”
Despite this ruling, the Internet Archive has vowed to continue acting as a library in other ways, including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.
