Some of the other commenters appear to believe that this court case is wholly or largely about 'Big publishers' acting against the public interest, or about attempting to extend/maintain copyright well after the author's death. What the Internet Archive did was lend far more copies of in-copyright books (including of living authors) than they had in their physical archives. The Internet Archive's argument at the time was that, because of Covid, people could not travel to their local library to borrow a physical copy, but this was a weak argument even then since many of the books made available would not have been present in those libraries - even the largest of libraries do not have 'everything', and the vast majority of libraries have only a very small selection of the books that are currently in print and/or in copyright.
I am a publishing author, and was angered by the Internet Archive's actions because they assumed ownership over the work of people like me. Margins are usually small in publishing. There are certainly situations in which publishers abuse their power to maximise profit, squeezing money out of readers while not adequately compensating authors for their work (I am especially thinking here of the pay walls in academic publishing, where someone may be charged 25 pounds or more for access to an article whilst the author gets nothing). On the whole, though, publishers and authors are in a mutually dependent relationship which the Internet Archive sabotaged by blocking both parties from making any money.
Yes, I believe the Internet Archive is extremely useful and important. It preserves information that used to be publicly available by archiving the web, and allows users to download books that are otherwise very hard to find or obtain. But this does not mean that what they did when they severed the link between the number of physical copies of in-copyright books in their collection and the number of copies which they made available to users was justified.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
