{"id":620296,"date":"2023-03-21T09:49:08","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T14:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/21\/ars-book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-ia-hurt-sales\/"},"modified":"2023-03-21T09:49:08","modified_gmt":"2023-03-21T14:49:08","slug":"ars-book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-ia-hurt-sales","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/21\/ars-book-publishers-with-surging-profits-struggle-to-prove-ia-hurt-sales\/","title":{"rendered":"Ars: \u201cBook publishers with surging profits struggle to prove IA hurt sales\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n \"Book
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Today, the Internet Archive (IA) defended its practice of digitizing books and lending those e-books for free to users of its Open Library<\/a>. In 2020, four of the wealthiest book publishers sued<\/a> IA, alleging this kind of digital lending was actually \u201cwillful digital piracy\u201d causing them \u201cmassive harm.\u201d But IA\u2019s lawyer, Joseph Gratz, argued that the Open Library\u2019s digitization of physical books is fair use, and publishers have yet to show they\u2019ve been harmed by IA\u2019s digital lending.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no evidence that the publishers have lost a dime,\u201d Gratz said during oral arguments at a New York district court.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s up to a federal judge, John Koeltl, to decide if IA\u2019s digital lending constitutes copyright infringement. During oral arguments, Koeltl\u2019s tough questioning of both Gratz and the plaintiff\u2019s attorney, Elizabeth McNamara, suggested that resolving this matter is a less straightforward task than either side has so far indicated. Koeltl pointed out that because publishers have a right to control the reproduction of their books, the \u201cheart of the case,\u201d was figuring out whether IA\u2019s book scanning violates copyrights by reproducing an already licensed physical book and lending it without paying more licensing fees to publishers.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoes the library have the right to make a copy of the book that it otherwise owns and then lend that e-book\u2014which it has made without a license and without permission\u2014to patrons of the library?\u201d Koeltl asked Gratz as a tense pushback to IA\u2019s stance that this particular case is just about a library\u2019s right to loan out books.<\/p>\n

McNamara argued that many libraries pay licensing fees to publishers to lend e-books, and she said this was the market harmed by IA\u2019s digital lending practices. The burden is on IA to prove that\u2019s not the case, or else it risks being found liable and potentially getting hit with a permanent injunction to stop the alleged infringing behavior.<\/p>\n

Although creating its own unsanctioned e-books triggered the lawsuit, Gratz argued that IA\u2019s digital lending is fair use, precisely because it makes copies of the physical books in its Open Library collection. That, he said, is \u201ctransformative\u201d fair use, utilizing technologies to transform millions of physical books in order to improve the efficiency of lending without encroaching on publishers\u2019 or authors\u2019 rights. Gratz said that IA avoids the conflict by only lending out e-books to one user at a time, causing no harm because it honors traditional lending in brick-and-mortar libraries that has been practiced for years without impacting publishers\u2019 bottom lines.<\/p>\n

The only exception to this one-to-one ratio was when IA launched the \u201cNational Emergency Library\u201d for 12 weeks when the pandemic started, offering \u201can enormous universe of scanned books to an unlimited number of individuals simultaneously,\u201d the plaintiff’s complaint said<\/a>.<\/p>\n

During this same time, however, the book publishing industry experienced so much demand that revenues rose by 12 percent, amounting to a $3 billion spike in sales by 2021, Publishers Weekly reported<\/a>. Because publishers profited when the National Emergency Library was made available, Koeltl pushed back on McNamara, asking how to reconcile the surge in profits with allegations of harm caused.<\/p>\n

McNamara seemed to suggest that publishers would have been further enriched if not for IA providing unprecedented free, unlimited e-books access. She also told Koeltl that publishers suing\u2014Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley\u2014are concerned that there are already some libraries avoiding paying e-book licensing fees by partnering with IA and making their own copies. If the court sanctioned IA\u2019s digitization practices and thousands of libraries started digitizing the books in their collections, the entire e-book licensing market would collapse, McNamara suggested.<\/p>\n

\u201cFree is an insurmountable competitor,\u201d the publishers\u2019 complaint said.<\/p>\n

Ars could not immediately reach the Internet Archive or the publishers\u2019 legal team for comment.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Margarete Schewe<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, the Internet Archive (IA) defended its practice of digitizing books and lending those e-books for free to users of its Open Library. In 2020, four of the wealthiest book publishers sued IA, alleging this kind of digital lending was actually \u201cwillful digital piracy\u201d causing them \u201cmassive harm.\u201d But IA\u2019s lawyer, Joseph Gratz, argued that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":620297,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30734,1461,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-620296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-book","category-publishers","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=620296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620296\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}