Prior to the internet, media and entertainment businesses made money by selling individual copies of content (think books, CDs, DVDS).īut individual copies have lost value in the internet era. Underlying this recent dispute is a now decades-old tension between media industries born before and after the advent of the internet. In a case in 2013 involving a “second-hand” market for digital copies of music, US courts decided that emulating analogue models of dissemination was not enough to evade copyright infringement.
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The Internet Archive may also have difficulty establishing that its practices are simply an extension of the traditional role of libraries, and beyond the boundaries of publisher’s legitimate markets.
Selling MP3s? You should have stuck with CDs There is room for the court to assess the public benefit of the Internet Archive’s lending practices which, as the National Emergency Library exemplifies, are undeniably strong.Īssessing whether the public interest arguments are strong enough to overcome the weight of the market harm may be key to deciding who wins this case. The flexibility of fair use is one thing the Internet Archive has on its side, however. This is different to the Google Books decision, in which providing access to snippets of books in Google’s database was considered to potentially enhance the market for books.
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It could be said that, by providing online access to books in full, the Internet Archive is doing for free what the publishers do for payment. The Internet Archive argues it is simply acting as a library, but the court may rule differently. In the United States, when deciding whether a use is fair or not, courts need to consider the extent to which the copyright owner’s markets are harmed.īecause book publishers often lend e-books commercially (including to libraries), the Internet Archive could be seen as harming that aspect of publishers’ market. A question of marketsīut the Google Books decision does not mean book publishers will lose again against the Internet Archive. When deciding for Google, the courts paid particular attention to the historical purpose of copyright, which is to serve the public interest in access to knowledge. In the case against Google, US courts decided that making full copies of books and displaying snippets of those books to the public in the Google Books database is a “fair use”.
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How to protect authors after Google Books wins its 'fair use' case, again In 2005, book publishers and authors brought a high-profile lawsuit against Google for copyright infringement, which took a decade to resolve. Google began digitising library books in 2002. Copyright déjà vu?ĭidn’t Google already win the argument about digital books years ago? Yes and no. The publishers are arguing that digital books are not equivalent to physical books and should be treated differently under the law. Once a library purchases a book, the library is free to lend it out to its members. Ordinary library lending does not require a payment to publishers. However, this restriction was temporarily relaxed for the National Emergency Library. The Internet Archive argues that, because it allows only one person at a time to borrow a digital book, it is simply replicating regular library lending. The publishers claim the Internet Archive is engaging in wilful mass copyright infringement by lending digital books without permission from and payment to publishers.
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