The Internet Archive Lost Its Appeal Against Book Publishers. Unknown If Other Industries Will Follow Suit

The Internet Archive, a repository of books, games, websites, and other digital media has lost its appeal in the case of Hachette v. Internet Archive. At dispute was the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library during the COVID-9 Pandemic which scanned hundreds of copies of books and made them readily available on the internet, in whole, for free. Hachette Book Group stated the program was in stark violation of copyright whereas the Internet Archive argued it was doing nothing but provide the same communal services a library does. As a result of losing its appeal, the Internet Archive is reported as having paid an undisclosed sum to settle the case; the National Emergency Library has been offline since this lawsuit was first filed.

There are those that feel that the Internet Archive largely brought this on itself when it actively flaunted digital book lending practices that all libraries adhere to such as limiting the number of digital copies to a book an establishment can lend within a lending period. Likewise, this lawsuit just pertains to IA's National Emergency Library and the case's impacts on the rest of its available remains unclear. With Romhacking.net gone and Vimm's Lair recently purged, the loss of IA's retro game catalogue would be devastating to the gaming hobby.

And even if you feel like IA was at fault in this case, mark my words, if the concept of libraries was invented or devised today, the publishers would be screaming about copyright violations. The Internet Archive and libraries are too often a red herring by book publishers to blame for poor compensation rates for authors when the reality is that they are the ones at fault. The compensation for authors, especially smaller ones, by these major publishing firms or Amazon Kindle is miniscule. Not Spotify or RIAA bad, but still pretty bad. Likewise, the Internet Archive's bread and butter remains lost media or out-of-print content and the prospect of losing all of its hard work, especially its Wayback Machine project, would be gut-wrenching.

Well, shit. This very well may impact the IA with other forms of media and that would just suck.

Yes, this case is pretty concerning. What the Internet Archive did was probably a bit too risky but still. Book publishers, like most other media publishers, are acting increasingly hostile to consumers and creators alike. They want more and more money while doing the extreme bare minimum. Notably, some of the publishers are listed in that Wired article as "Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley". At least two of these are university textbook publishers, who are some of the most hostile book publishers there are. Wiley in particular loves to change their textbooks slightly every year so that students can't use previous editions, and more recently have started locking some of the content to only be available online using a key included with new copies of the book. When I was still in university in 2019, pre-pandemic, the textbook situation was already getting bad enough that some of my professors were either opting to use open source online textbooks (a new thing at the time) instead or were turning a blind eye (or in the case of one prof, actively encouraging when he found out the publisher of the textbook for the course had raised its price to over $300) on students using "digital copies" (pirated PDFs) of textbooks. I would imagine after 2020 that attitude has become even more prevalent.

Probably unrelated, but at the start of the month, the Internet Archive locked down much of their retro game catalogue. To access most of it now, you need an account (which, the accounts are free but this still likely will stop a lot of drop-in downloaders). A few months back they also started heavily throttling the download speed of these game ROMs. I think this is partly explained by them wanting to save on bandwidth costs associated with downloads since I imagine they were seeing many terabytes of downloads a day on those old game libraries. But part of me also thinks this is to add an extra layer of friction to make it look like they aren't just openly hosting many terabytes of ROMs in a way that game publishers would freak out about.

Also yeah, libraries would definitely not exist today if they weren't an entrenched institution already. They cost money, which causes people with certain views a lot of anger, and they arguably prevent a certain portion of media sales, which impacts media publishers who have become extremely greedy. The type of people who get angry about libraries tend to be completely blind (either willfully or otherwise) to the public good that libraries do and the importance of them.

I donated.