Last Friday, the Internet Archive was in court, fighting for the digital rights of libraries. Our appeal in Hachette v. Internet Archive, the publishers’ lawsuit against our library, was heard in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
Here are some resources to help you understand what happened in court:
🔊 Listen to the oral argument. The full 90+ minute proceedings are available to listen to online.
🗞️ Read the analysis of the oral argument from Authors Alliance. Executive Director Dave Hansen offered a rapid analysis of the oral argument in a thorough Substack post.
📚 Read coverage of the post-argument discussion at the American Library Association Annual Conference. Following oral argument, the legal team representing the Internet Archive and Brewster Kahle, digital librarian of the Internet Archive, remotely joined the eBook Interest Group discussion during ALA’s Annual Conference in San Diego. The conversation offered Brewster and the legal team a chance to explain what happened in the courtroom, and to answer questions from librarians and members of the press who gathered for the session. Ars Technica covered the discussion in an excellent post, “Appeals court seems lost on how Internet Archive harms publishers.”
Take action
Tell the publishers: Let Readers Read! We have an open letter to the publishers, asking them to restore access to the 500,000+ books they’ve removed from our lending library as a result of their lawsuit. Sign the open letter today!
Welp. looks like i need to get more people to sign the petition.
still I’m glad you guys did your best and now i must play my part in helping out.
In any case: #longlivetheinternetarchive.
I’m a massive fan of Internet Archive, it’s a wonderful resource but I suspect the Change petition is not the best way for you to gather support….it’s very ‘clingy’ , and you get bombarded by follow up emails which can become a nuisance over time and put off potential supporters from signing.
Let’s try to get Maria Pallante of the AAP fired! What do you think?
Sounds good, let’s get as many allies in our fight.
So what next? Are publishers going to remove books from libraries? Afterall, one can just as easily go to the library and borrpw books for free. Actually I will restate the last sentence, because going to the library to check out a book may not be so “easily” accomplished for people with physical mobility issues.
We need to create something similar to bit torrent except it needs to be completely open source (should be CC0) and it needs to be a system where the public installs the software and preallocates a certain amount of space on their computer creating a dedicated public distributed encrypted peer to peer based cloud storage server system. Enough volunteers running these servers would create a massive free encrypted peer to peer cloud storage service with infinite space world wide that would be very difficult to take offline.
We need to do this to create Internet Archive 2.0 because greed and corruption will eventually kill the internet archive and get it TAKEN OFFLINE!!!
Who the fuck is hachette , Hey hachette I am from India , we dont afford costly Books but archive make it easy. So please withdraw the lawsuit….
So, what’s true at this point? Were the 500,000+ books removed altogether from the archive or just locked behind a wall (i.e. the whole ‘patrons with print disabilities’ thing)?
So, what is next? Are you winning or…? I still did not get what happened. I would like to understand deeply. If possible, please someone explain me. I am possessing a difficult time understanding what is up.