The Internet Archive digital library was forced to withdraw from its “controlled digital loan” offer more than 500,000 books that it had legally acquired and digitized. A self-censorship that many researchers, students, Wikipedians and readers, in the whole world.
Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Internet Archive, has just announced that he has removed more than 500,000 books from his online “open library” at the request of the publishers who sued him, and whose appeal is expected to have takes place on June 28.
The American non-profit organization, whose objective is to provide a “ universal access to all knowledge », buys or collects books in paper format in the form of donations, digitizes them before offering them in the form of a “controlled digital loan”.
These .epub files can therefore only be “borrowed” by one Internet user at a time, and for a limited period of time, in the same way as traditional libraries do:
“ Our position is simple: we simply want to allow users of our library to borrow and read the books we own, like any other library. »
In the presentation page of the complaint of which the “open library” is the subject, the Electronic Frontier Foundation specifies in fact that this “controlled digital loan” system makes it possible to borrow digital copies of books “ for a duration of two weeks or less, and only allows users to borrow the number of copies that the Internet Archive and its partner libraries physically own “.
This did not prevent Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley and Penguin Random House from attacking the NGO on the grounds that this system would violate their copyright, that it had already cost them millions of dollars, and that he threatened their activities.
