Federal Courts Are Cracking Down on the Internet Archive

"The Archive argued that its Open Library was protected by fair use doctrine and that scanning the books was a transformative use of the material done in the public interest.

"Our take is that it's absurd that the Internet Archive is allowed to mail me a physical book it owns. The physical publishers can't stop that. But [the Archive] can't give me the same content in digital form," Cara Gagliano, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is representing the Archive in court, told KQED in San Francisco.

The 2nd Circuit rejected that argument almost entirely, holding that the Archive's digitization didn't improve the efficiency of lending; that it didn't constitute transformative works, but rather "derivative" works; and that it directly competed with publishers by offering free versions of their entire product...."