They’re burning the modern Library of Alexandria. That’s one way to describe the recent ruling of the Second Circuit US Court of Appeals against the Internet Archive (IA). The court sided with big-name publishers like Hachette, ruling that IA was violating copyright law with its online lending program. The decision nuked over five hundred thousand books from the IA lending library.
The IA’s National Emergency Library (NEL) was a remarkable nonprofit initiative launched in 2020 during the pandemic, offering vital access to books while people were separated from their friends, family, colleagues, recreational sites, bookstores, and libraries. The separation affected leisure readers as well as those who rely on book access for work, including public and private researchers.
The emergency library was part of the IA’s broader access program, the Open Library. The NEL, however, allowed more users to check out digital “copies” of books than they could under the more restricted Open Library rules. In essence, when the pandemic closed physical libraries, the IA threw open the doors of its digital library. Knowledge, after all, wants to be free.
Matthew Gault, writing for Gizmodo, notes that the court rejected the IA’s defense that its digital lending practice was fair use under copyright law. The court ruled that simply scanning and sharing digital copies, without license or corresponding physical books, wasn’t protected. Incidentally, this practice resembles what big capital’s artificial intelligence companies do when they scrape an author’s work to train their models. But that’s another matter, of course.
Gault points out that the court, while ruling against IA, still criticized the publishing industry for “screwing over libraries.” The court acknowledged that “eBook licensing fees may impose a burden on libraries and reduce access to creative work.”
“May,” indeed. They most certainly do. High licensing fees are…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: David Moscrop
