A federal judge ruled against the digital database
Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House sued Internet Archive following the implementation of its
On its blog, the archive’s director of open libraries Chris Freeland wrote that the
This week, Judge John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan decided that
The
“We will continue our work as a library,” he noted. “This case does not challenge many of the services we provide with digitized books including interlibrary loan, citation linking, access for the print-disabled, text and data mining, purchasing ebooks, and ongoing donation and preservation of books.”
“Libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products. For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books,” said Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle in a statement. “This ruling is a blow for libraries, readers, and authors and we plan to appeal it.”