A federal judge has ruled against the Internet Archive in Hachette v. Internet Archive,<\/em> a lawsuit brought against it<\/a> by four book publishers, deciding that the website does not have the right to scan books and lend them out like a library. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Judge John G. Koeltl decided that the Internet Archive had done nothing more than create \u201cderivative works,\u201d and so would have needed authorization from the books\u2019 copyright holders \u2014 the publishers \u2014 before lending them out through its National Emergency Library program.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Internet Archive says it will appeal. \u201cToday\u2019s lower court decision in Hachette v. Internet Archive<\/em> is a blow to all libraries and the communities we serve,\u201d Chris Freeland, the director of Open Libraries at the Internet Archive, writes in a blog post<\/a>. \u201cThis decision impacts libraries across the US who rely on controlled digital lending to connect their patrons with books online. It hurts authors by saying that unfair licensing models are the only way their books can be read online. And it holds back access to information in the digital age, harming all readers, everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The two sides went to court on Monday<\/a>, with HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House joining Hachette as plaintiffs. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n In his ruling, Judge Koetl considered whether the Internet Archive was operating under the principle of Fair Use, which previously protected<\/a> a digital book preservation project by Google Books and HathiTrust in 2014, among other users. Fair Use considers whether using a copyrighted work is good for the public, how much it\u2019ll impact the copyright holder, how much of the work has been copied, and whether the use has \u201ctransformed\u201d a copyrighted thing into something new, among other things. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The judge dismissed all of the IA\u2019s Fair Use arguments<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But Koetl wrote that any \u201calleged benefits\u201d from the Internet Archive\u2019s library \u201ccannot outweigh the market harm to the publishers,\u201d declares that \u201cthere is nothing transformative about [Internet Archive\u2019s] copying and unauthorized lending,\u201d and that copying these books doesn\u2019t provide \u201ccriticism, commentary, or\u00a0information about them.\u201d He notes that the Google Books use was found \u201ctransformative\u201d because it created a searchable database instead of simply publishing copies of books on the internet.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Koetl also dismissed arguments that the Internet Archive might theoretically have helped publishers sell more<\/em> copies of their books, saying there was no direct evidence, and that it was \u201cirrelevant\u201d that the Internet Archive had purchased its own copies of the books before making copies for its online audience. According to data obtained during the trial, the Internet Archive currently hosts around 70,000 e-book \u201cborrows\u201d a day. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The lawsuit came from the Internet Archive\u2019s decision to launch the \u201cNational Emergency Library\u201d<\/a> early in the covid pandemic, which let people read from 1.4 million digitized books with no waitlist. Typically, the Internet Archive\u2019s Open Library program operates under a \u201ccontrolled digital lending\u201d (CDL) system where it can loan out digitized copies of a book on a one-to-one basis, but it removed those waitlists to offer easier access to those books when stay-at-home orders arrived during the pandemic. (CDL systems operate differently than services like OverDrive, which can lend you publisher-licensed ebooks.) Some weren\u2019t happy<\/a> about the Internet Archive\u2019s choice, and the group of publishers sued the organization in June 2020<\/a>. Later that month, the Archive shut down that program<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Internet Archive says it will continue acting as a library in other ways, despite the decision. \u201cThis case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books,\u201d writes Freeland. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n