This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.
The Internet Archive's Open Library, which works in a similar way to traditional libraries and lends digital copies of purchased or donated physical books, has had to remove around 500,000 books from its collection due to a copyright lawsuit brought by major publishers. Chris Freeland, librarian at the non-profit organization based in San Francisco, made the announcement in a blog post. According to Freeland, the lending project, which was launched in 2007, comprised 24 million bibliographic records and links to 1.2 million digitized books just two years later. In 2020, around 1.5 million works were available for lending. This means that around a third of the online inventory is currently no longer available.
The publishers Hachette, Harpercollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann) sued the Internet Archive in New York in 2020. In the high-profile case, they accuse the operator of intentionally infringing copyright with the Open Library by scanning books, uploading the digital copies to its own servers and offering them on a publicly accessible website. Authors and publishers are not remunerated for these uses. During the coronavirus pandemic, the creators temporarily opened their online library, which had already been criticized by copyright holders, to students as a "National Emergency Library" for an unlimited period of time, which ultimately triggered the lawsuit. In March 2023, the court ruled that the archive was liable for copyright infringements and should pay damages.
The Internet Archive appealed against this decision at the end of last year. The operator argues that its "controlled digital lending program" constitutes lawful use on the basis of the US "fair use" doctrine. The case is also about preserving the principle of traditional library lending in the digital world and the free transfer of knowledge associated with it. A hearing will take place on June 28, for which the Internet Archive is now preparing itself further publicly and making the extent of the effects of the first instance ruling known.
"Important work for readers and authors"
According to the cease-and-desist declaration under discussion in the second round of proceedings, all groups of companies belonging to the plaintiff publishers can send the operator lists of the works they are currently marketing commercially as e-books at any time. The Internet Archive then has 14 days to remove these from its online library. Over the past few months, a lot has come together. If the publishers do not offer a title as an e-book, the archive may initially continue to lend the scans it has produced online.
"Our position is clear," Freeland now explains: "We simply want to make it possible for our library visitors to borrow and read the books we own, just like in any other library. We buy and acquire books - yes, physical, printed books - and make them available for someone to borrow and read online. This work is important for readers and authors alike, as many younger and low-income readers can only read when books are available to borrow for free." In addition, many works are only discovered or preserved through the work of librarians.
Google Books benefits from fair use
"We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed," emphasizes Freeland. He is referring to the digital rights management (DRM) used. To defend this, the Internet Archive has already taken action against an anti-DRM tool. It is the same technology "that is also used by commercial publishers", explains Freeland. However, the plaintiffs demanded "that we should not be allowed to lend the books we own". The first court decision and the resulting injunction had generally had "profoundly negative consequences" for users. "They have flooded us with many requests," writes the librarian. "From the hundreds of testimonials we have received, it is clear that access to our books remains an absolute necessity for the many people around the world who rely on our library for their education and professional development."
The operator has written an open letter to the publishers urging them to restore access to the books and the knowledge they contain. The petition is open for co-signing. There is a chance of success in reopening the case. In 2015, for example, a US appeals court ruled that Google's Books book scanning project does not infringe copyright. The use complied with the fair use concept. However, Google Books does not allow users to borrow books, but to browse digitized books and read excerpts. Furthermore, in a copyright dispute between a university and the publisher Cambridge University Press, US courts largely ruled against the latter with reference to fair use. The bone of contention here was that students posted excerpts from protected works in the university's online forums.
(anw)
FAQs
Internet Archive fans beg publishers to stop emptying the open library. As a result of book publishers successfully suing the Internet Archive (IA) last year, the free online library that strives to keep growing online access to books recently shrank by about 500,000 titles.
Is Internet Archive library legit? ›
The Internet Archive is an American nonprofit digital library founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials including websites, software applications, music, audiovisual, and print materials. The Archive also advocates for a free and open Internet.
How does Internet Archive avoid copyright? ›
In that regard, Koeltl writes that the “Internet Archive's fair-use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book.
Is it legal to read books on the Internet Archive? ›
The court decisively ruled that Internet Archive's practice of scanning books and making them freely available on its website is copyright infringement and does not constitute fair use.
What publishers are in the Internet Archive lawsuit? ›
The original lawsuit was filed by the publishers in June 2020 and argued that the Internet Archive had digitized “millions of print books and [distributed] the resulting bootleg ebooks free of charge from its site, without the consent of the publishers and their authors or the payment of any license fee.”
Who funds the Internet Archive? ›
The Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, uses thousands of computer servers to save multiple digital copies of these pages, requiring over 70 petabytes of data. It is funded through donations, grants and payments for its digitization services.
Is Internet Archive legal and safe? ›
As a library, the Internet Archive has, in the words of the GDPR, a “legitimate interest” in building collections, providing permanent public access, and maintaining archival integrity.
Does Internet Archive track you? ›
Technical details. Because archive.org does not employ tracking cookies to track users, our view counting system uses a privacy protecting hash of the user's IP as a user id. At the end of each day we process all of our web server logs from all of our hosts.
Can you get something taken down from Internet Archive? ›
If you would like to submit a copyright claim for material found on archive.org, please refer to our Copyright Policy. If you would like to submit a request for archives of your site or account to be excluded from web.archive.org, send us a request to info@archive.org and indicate: the URL or URLs of the material.
Is everything on Internet Archive copyright free? ›
The Internet Archive is an excellent source of public domain works and CC-licensed work. Make sure to check the record before you reuse any audio. You should see a CC license icon or a C with a line through it (the public domain mark).
What is the loan duration for Internet Archive books? Books are generally available for renewable 1-hour loans. Some books also offer a longer 14-day loan; for these books, if there are no copies available, users can join a waitlist. (There is currently no waitlist available for books that only offer 1-hour loans.)
Are all books on the Internet Archive in public domain? ›
The Internet Archive offers over 15,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts free to read, download, and print. (Some texts have restrictions on bulk re-use and commercial use, so check any restrictions set for the collection or by the sponsor of a book.)
Does Internet Archive Archive everything? ›
Do you collect all the sites on the Web? No, the Archive collects web pages that are publicly available.
Why have so many books been removed from the Internet Archive? ›
Internet Archive (IA), a non-profit digital library, will have to remove nearly 500,000 titles from its collections of digitised materials as publishers have won a lawsuit against the site, according to a report by Ars Technica.
Why are books unavailable on the Internet Archive? ›
Why are so many books listed as “Borrow Unavailable” at the Internet Archive. More than 500,000 books have been taken out of lending as a result of Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers' lawsuit against our library, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged books.
What is the difference between Internet Archive and Open Library? ›
Open Library contains information about books. Internet Archive hosts a collection of digitized books. Open Library's universal catalog provides links to discover, borrow, and read from the Internet Archive's collections. Your Internet Archive account can be used to sign-in to Open Library.
What is the Internet Archive library? ›
The Internet Archive is an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It provides free public access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, software applications/games, music, movies/videos, moving images, and millions of books.
Is downloading games from the Internet Archive legal? ›
In some cases, the games may be considered abandonware and the copyright holder may have given up their rights to the game. However, in other cases, the copyright holder may still own the rights to the game and downloading it could be considered piracy.
Is Internet Archive Wayback Machine legit? ›
Yes! The Wayback Machine is built so that it can be used and referenced. If you find an archived page that you would like to reference on your Web page or in an article, you can copy the URL. You can even use fuzzy URL matching and date specification… but that's a bit more advanced.
Is Internet Archive Open Library free? ›
The Internet Archive makes many titles available as eBooks for free through the Open Library! All you need to do to access a digital copy is create an Internet Archive account with any email address and password.
