A federal judge ruled in favor of four major publishing companies that sued the non-profit Internet Archive for "mass copyright infringement."
The publishers sued the Archive in the summer of 2020 after the non-profit group made digital copies of copyrighted books available for online borrowing during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Internet Archive established the National Emergency Library from March 24 to June 16, 2020.
- The Emergency Library suspended the Archive's normal rule of only allowing one user to borrow a copyrighted digital book at a time.
- The four publishers — Hatchette, HarperCollins, Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House — subsequently sued the Internet Archive on the grounds that the Emergency Library program violated copyright law.
- The Archive's legal team cited the "fair use doctrine" to argue that it was not violating copyright law for books that were made available during the Emergency Library.
- The judge rejected this argument, saying that, "lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book," does not entitle "the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it."
- The Archive plans to appeal the ruling.
The Internet Archive, which was founded in 1996, is best known for hosting the Wayback Machine, which has archived over 800 billion web pages.
