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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Deprives creators of compensation in what way? It requires a copy or copies of the book to have been purchased in order to lend out. And, the creators of books see dick-all from the sale of the book. Most of the money goes to the publisher, who acts as a gatekeeper to decide which books are worth publishing and de-incentivizes the production of new works. What a dumb argument in addition to being morally reprehensible.