In 27 years of existence Internet Archive It established itself as the great library of the Internet. In it you will find not only the remains of the defunct website, but also a large number of digital resources, including books, movies and music. However, the Internet Archive has been facing a lawsuit for two years that could lead to its closure, as four publishers accuse the library and its lending company of damage and copyright infringement.

One of the most popular internet archive services is controlled digital lending (CDL), which provides users with access to a digital library of books. Its operation consists of users can borrow as many copies of the book as are physically owned by the Internet Archive and its partners, so if the Internet Archive only has one copy of a book, it can lend it to only one person, while the rest of those interested in the book will have to wait for their return. In essence, it is a digital implementation of typical physical library operations.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains that CDL is a method used by the Internet Archive to preserve books whose publishers have lost commercial interest. However, Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley and Penguin Random House believe the service infringes copyrighttherefore, they decided to file a lawsuit on June 1, 2020, to demand the destruction of all alleged illegal copies of the works offered by the digital library and that the digital library compensate them for the hypothetical damages caused to them by CDL.

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The first oral hearing of the case was held on Monday of this week in the courthouse for the Southern District of New York. The Internet Archive defended the digital rights of all libraries, arguing that a library has the right to make and lend a digital copy of a print book it owns without obtaining official permission from the original publisher. Not surprisingly, publishers disagree.

The Internet Archive currently has approximately 1.3 million books in digital format through CDL. The digital library has revealed that it follows essentially the same processes with its services as traditional library loans, and that it poses no real harm to authors or the publishing industry. He also said that libraries have collectively paid billions of dollars to publishers to include books in their print collections, and that he is investing heavily in digitization to preserve those books.

The plaintiff publishers demand not only payment for the alleged damages, but also the destruction of millions of books that have been digitized by the Internet Archive.. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, called the publishers’ demand “horrendous” and that if it goes ahead it will have a “chilling effect on the hundreds of libraries that lend out digitized books like ours. It could be around the time of the burning of the Library of Alexandria: millions of books disappeared from our community libraries.’

We’ll see how that plays out, but the sheer power of the copyright industry is well known, so it stands to reason that the Internet Archive has hit a rough patch.