The Internet Archive’s system for digitally lending e-books and its emergency pandemic library weren’t fair use of thousands of books owned by HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and other major publishers, a New York federal court said.
The publishers attacked both Internet Archive’s “controlled digital lending” that allows one-at-a-time online book rentals, and its brief removal of controls during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020.
Those both constituted copyright infringement that failed the statutory test for fair use, the US District Court for the Southern District of New York said on Friday as it granted summary judgment to the publishers.
The decision ...