The decision is another blow to the nonprofit in the Hachette v. Internet Archive case. In 2020, four major publishers — Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins — sued the Internet Archive over claims its digital library constitutes “willful digital piracy on an industrial scale.”
The Internet Archive has long offered a system called the Open Library, where users can “check out” digital scans of physical books. The library was based on a principle called controlled digital lending, where each loan corresponds to a physically purchased book held in a library — avoiding, in theory, a piracy claim. It’s a fundamentally different system from programs like OverDrive, where publishers sell limited-time licenses to ebooks on their own terms.