Publishers ask court to uphold finding against Internet Archive
In the US, publishers Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and Wiley have filed a brief in the Second Circuit court of appeals asking that the court uphold Judge John G Koeltl’s March 2023 finding that the scanning and lending of library books by the Internet Archive (IA) is a copyright infringement, reports Publishers Weekly.
The development comes after lawyers for IA filed a brief in December 2023 arguing that Koeltl misunderstood the facts and misapplied the law in his finding, and that the decision should be reversed.
In asking the Second Circuit court of appeals to uphold Koeltl’s original finding, lawyers for the plaintiff publishers in the case argued that IA’s scanning and lending of print library books under a practice known as controlled digital lending (CDL) was ‘a frontal assault on the foundational copyright principle that rightsholders exclusively control the terms of sale for every different format of their work’.
The brief states: ‘In short, IA’s practice of CDL is radical and unlawful. A decision deeming CDL fair use would have a dire impact on book publishing and all creative industries. Libraries around the country could skirt the current library ebook markets, fundamentally interfering with the publishers’ digital strategies and destabilising book markets. More broadly, other technology companies could implement their own unchecked mass-digitisation programs for books and other media, including movies, music and video games, thus seizing control of digital distribution and misappropriating valuable intellectual property.’
As previously reported by Books+Publishing, the suit against IA, for which Koeltl found in favour of the publishers, was filed by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and major publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House in June 2020, alleging the IA’s scanning and lending of library books is piracy on an industrial scale. The IA argued that its activities were protected by fair use, and that the suit fundamentally threatens the core mission of libraries to own and lend collections in the digital age.
Category: International news
