Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, HarperCollins sue Internet Archive, saying its project to let users borrow ebooks scanned from books violates copyrights
Elizabeth A. Harris / New York Times :
Context & Ripple Effects
This June 2020 suit is the opening move in what became the defining copyright fight of the decade for books. Four major publishers — [[a:none|Hachette]], Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins — argued that scanning physical books and lending them one-at-a-time online was infringement, not library service. The case turned on a deceptively simple question: who owns an ebook, and does buying a paper copy confer any right to lend its digital twin?
The arc that followed validated the publishers' strategy. A US judge sided with them in March 2023, and the Internet Archive's subsequent appeal kept the fight alive while the Archive agreed to drop the publishers' full book catalogs from its lending program. The same plaintiff coalition then carried the doctrine into a new arena, suing Meta and Google over AI models trained on copyrighted books.
First-order effects
- The Internet Archive faces an existential legal threat to its Open Library: if courts accept the publishers' framing, every scanned-and-lent title is infringing regardless of how few 'copies' circulate at once.
- The four publishers establish a test case they control — small enough defendant, clear-cut conduct — that lets them set the boundary of digital lending without touching their own licensing businesses.
Second-order effects
- A publisher win forces other digital-lending operations — library consortia, school platforms — to license rather than scan, channeling revenue through publisher-controlled terms and raising costs for underfunded libraries.
- The legal theory proven here becomes reusable ammunition: the same publishers, joined by Scott Turow, later deploy it against far richer targets in class-action suits against Meta and Google over Gemini training data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, copyright enforcement consolidates around litigation-first coalitions of large publishers and authors' representatives, with nonprofit archives and AI developers alike treated as unlicensed distributors.
- The case pushes the industry toward a regime where no copy exists outside a license — physical ownership grants nothing digitally — concentrating pricing power over ebooks, library lending, and eventually AI training corpora in publisher hands.
The trend: Book publishing is extending copyright enforcement from pirate sites to any unauthorized digital use — scanned lending first, AI training next — using the same plaintiff playbook across each new copying technology.