Internet Archive for eBooks violates copyrights

A U.S. judge ruled that Internet Archive infringed the copyrights of four major U.S. publishers, as the online library lent out digitally scanned copies of the publishers’ books, which led to a ruling by US District Judge John Koeltl in Manhattan on Friday.

The ruling came in a lawsuit that tested the ability of the platform to lend out works of writers and publishers protected by U.S. copyright laws.

The four publishing houses — Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House — accused the Internet Archive of “mass copyright infringement” for loaning out digital copies of books without the publishers’ permission.

The San Francisco based platform has scanned millions of print books and lent them out digitally for free. Many of the books were in the public domain, but 3.6 million are protected by valid copyrights.

33,000 titles belonged to Hachette Book Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins Publishers, and John Wiley & Sons Inc.

In 2020, they sued over 127 books, after the platform expanded lending due to the pandemic by lifting limits on how many people could borrow the same book, to replace the libraries that were forced to close.

The platform has since returned to what it calls “controlled digital lending” and currently hosts about 70,000 daily e-Book borrows.

“Although IA has the right to lend print books it lawfully acquired, it does not have the right to scan those books and lend the digital copies en masse,” wrote Koeltl

The platform promised an appeal and said that the ruling “holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.”

The head of Association of American Publishers, Maria Pallante, said in a statement that the ruling “underscored the importance of authors, publishers, and creative markets in a global society.”