<nettime> Commercial publishers sue Internet Archive over lending

[nettime's avid lender <nettime@kein.org>]

blog.archive.org
/2020/06/10/temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close-2-weeks-early-returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/

Temporary National Emergency Library to close 2 weeks early, returning
to traditional controlled digital lending - Internet Archive Blogs


Within a few days of the announcement that libraries, schools and
colleges across the nation would be closing due to the COVID-19 global
pandemic, we launched the temporary National Emergency Library to
provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities,
independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation during the closures.

We have heard hundreds of stories from librarians, authors, parents,
teachers, and students about how the NEL has filled an important gap
during this crisis.

Ben S., a librarian from New Jersey, for example, told us that he used
the NEL “to find basic life support manuals needed by frontline medical
workers in the academic medical center I work at. Our physical
collection was closed due to COVID-19 and the NEL allowed me to still
make available needed health informational materials to our hospital
patrons.” We are proud to aid frontline workers.

Today we are announcing the National Emergency Library will close on
June 16th, rather than June 30th, returning to traditional controlled
digital lending. We have learned that the vast majority of people use
digitized books on the Internet Archive for a very short time. Even with
the closure of the NEL, we will be able to serve most patrons through
controlled digital lending, in part because of the good work of the
non-profit HathiTrust Digital Library. HathiTrust’s new Emergency
Temporary Access Service features a short-term access model that we plan
to follow.

We moved up our schedule because, last Monday, four commercial
publishers chose to sue Internet Archive during a global pandemic.
However, this lawsuit is not just about the temporary National Emergency
Library. The complaint attacks the concept of any library owning and
lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in
the digital world. This lawsuit stands in contrast to some academic
publishers who initially expressed concerns about the NEL, but
ultimately decided to work with us to provide access to people cut off
from their physical schools and libraries. We hope that similar
cooperation is possible here, and the publishers call off their costly
assault.

Controlled digital lending is how many libraries have been providing
access to digitized books for nine years.  Controlled digital lending is
a legal framework, developed by copyright experts, where one reader at a
time can read a digitized copy of a legally owned library book. The
digitized book is protected by the same digital protections that
publishers use for the digital offerings on their own sites. Many
libraries, including the Internet Archive, have adopted this system
since 2011 to leverage their investments in older print books in an
increasingly digital world.

We are now all Internet-bound and flooded with misinformation and
disinformation—to fight these we all need access to books more than
ever. To get there we need collaboration between libraries, authors,
booksellers, and publishers.

Let’s build a digital system that works.




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