Publishers charge the Internet Archive with copyright infringement

Publishers charge the Internet Archive with copyright infringement

Jun 01 2020

Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed a lawsuit on Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York charging the Internet Archive with copyright infringement. The suit asks the court to issue preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent the IA’s scanning, public display, and distribution of literary works, which it makes available to the public through such businesses as its Open Library and National Emergency Library.

In its suit, the publishers make clear it is not suing the IA over “the occasional transmission of a title under appropriately limited circumstances, nor about anything permissioned or in the public domain,” but rather over the IA's “purposeful collection of truckloads of in-copyright books to scan, reproduce, and then distribute digital bootleg versions online.”

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