Many of us love using the Internet Archive for its Wayback Machine and music files. During and after the pandemic, the Internet Archive made books available to many simultaneous users short-term loan. Commercial publishers were very unhappy, arguing that the Internet Archive violated copyright, and they sued the Internet Archive.
The 2023 lawsuit, Hachette v. Internet Archive ruled in favor of the publisher Hachette. The Internet Archive appealed but unfortunately, as we learned today, they lost their case. The lawsuit was tied into how we interpret fair use and the courts considered the Internet Archive’s digitization project as derivative and not transformative, meaning that all they did was create copies but not new content. This ruling will likely result in the removal of many books in the Internet Archive, inconveniencing researchers and students. A similar lawsuit related to music in the Internet Archive is pending.
A relatively plain language explanation of the ruling is available in Wired.
