The so-called National Emergency Library, a digital library with e-books from the Internet Archive that has no waiting lists during the corona pandemic, has been the target of criticism from collecting societies. They feel that this is at the expense of the authors of the books.
A week ago, the Internet Archive introduced the National Emergency Library, in which 1.4 million digitized books are available for users to borrow. The organization has had such a digital library for some time, but with the current corona crisis and the many closed schools and libraries in the US, the Internet Archive considered it appropriate to temporarily remove the normal waiting lists. According to the organization, it has already received many thank you messages from teachers and librarians for helping their pupils and students thanks to the National Emergency Library that can be used worldwide. The Internet Archive states that there are now a total of 650 million books in US public libraries “that taxpayers have paid to access and those books are now on the shelves and are inaccessible.”
The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, among others, have criticized this initiative. The Authors Guild says it is shocked that the Internet Archive is using the Covid-19 epidemic as an excuse to push copyright further into the abyss, harming authors who often struggled anyway. The organization believes it deprives authors of the opportunity to release their books in digital form once they are out of print. Removing the previous limitation of one user per book is also not well received by the Authors Guild. The Association of American Publishers calls the initiative illegal and an opportunistic attack on authors’ rights during the coronavirus pandemic. The Copyright Alliance director also questions the motives of Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Internet Archive. According to the director, this initiative is particularly ‘despicable’ given the timing and personal wealth of the internet entrepreneur and multimillionaire Kahle.
The Internet Archive has in turn responded to the criticism. According to the organization, the books were obtained through purchases or donations, just like traditional libraries. According to the Internet Archive, this system is similar to the one used by e-book publishers. The organization states that the current practice of the National Emergency Library comes close to the usual policy of controlled digital lending, where fair use forms the basis. This would not be against US law. The Internet Archive further states that it is not legally obliged to request permission from authors or publishers to digitize and make available their books.
The Internet Archive’s digital library works by scanning physical books and then lending them digitally as e-books, which involves DRM and a two-week loan system that blocks borrowers’ access if they not checking out their books at the end. Images are created from each book page and those images are then available in an Internet book reader, via encrypted PDFs, or through what the organization describes as “inferior” .epub files. This lower quality is related to the fact that the files are based on uncorrected optical character recognition, which may contain errors.