Publishers Sue Internet Archive Over Digital Library

"The Internet Archive’s “Open Library” and “National Emergency Library” initiatives amount to “willful mass copyright infringement” by distributing scanned copies of over 1.3 million books without paying authors or publishers, four major publishing companies said in a Manhattan federal court complaint Monday.

Hachette Book Group Inc., HarperCollins Publishers LLC, John Wiley & Sons Inc., and Penguin Random House LLC told the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York that the Archive’s actions “grossly exceed legitimate library services, do violence to the Copyright Act, and constitute willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.” The publishers say the initiative “seeks to destroy the carefully calibrated ecosystem that makes books possible in the first place.”

The nonprofit has said it started the “National Emergency Library” initiative in response to the Covid-19 crisis’s shuttering of public libraries. It removed limits on how many people can borrow its digitized copies of books at once from its “Open Library” until June 30 or the end of the emergency. ..."