They say no good deed goes unpunished, and this is especially the case if your good deeds happen to break copyright rules. It’s something the Internet Archive learned recently, when it lost a legal battle with the major book publishers, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House and John Wiley & Sons.
The crime? Back in 2020, during the pandemic’s darkest days, the Archive launched a “National Emergency Library” that let users virtually borrow books that the organisation had scanned and digitised.
The case specifically hinged on 127 books in the collection, with the publishers arguing the library was committing “mass copyright infringement”, as the digitising of the books did not fall under the “fair use” rules in US copyright law that permits the redistribution of copyrighted material if a “derivative work”…
