A few years ago, as COVID-19 lockdowns raged on, the nonprofit Internet Archive created a temporary “National Emergency Library” of millions of books to help teachers and students access educational materials. The National Emergency Library suspended the usual waitlist between borrows, allowing anyone to borrow a book even if someone else had already borrowed it.
The site was sued by four major book publishers who claimed that the Internet Archive’s digital book lending practices infringed on publisher and author copyrights.
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Typically, publishers and authors get a cut of the profits on the initial sale of a physical book, but they license e-books rather than sell them outright. A digital library is allowed to lend a digital copy of a physical book as long as it pulls the physical copy of the same book off of the shelf, ensuring that only one copy of the book was lent at a…
