New best story on Hacker News: Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit

Tell HN: Internet Archive is facing a Big 4 Publishers lawsuit
438 by antiverse | 122 comments on Hacker News.
Not sure why this isn't more prominently highlighted, but this is a very culturally significant project and a custodian of a tremendous amount of Internet and WWW-oriented history. I would imagine HN would put this at the forefront of the discussions happening here. I'm not affiliated, but I am a concerned netizen. All of us here have benefited from The IA. Please help raise awareness as to what is happening. Read more here, and elsewhere - https://ift.tt/bEmvJUD > In June 2020, four major publishers—John Wiley & Sons and three of the big five US publishers, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Penguin Random House—filed a lawsuit against the Internet Archive, claiming the non-profit organization, “is engaged in willful mass copyright infringement.” > The lawsuit stems from the corporate publishers response to an innovative temporary initiative launched by the Internet Archive during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic called the National Emergency Library. Given the impact of the public health emergency, the Internet Archive decided to ease its book lending restrictions and allow multiple people to check out the same digital copy of a book at once. > Up to that point, the Internet Archive had established a practice of purchasing copies of printed books, digitizing them and lending them to borrowers one at a time. When it kicked-off the emergency lending program, the Internet Archive made it clear that this policy would be in effect until the end of the pandemic. Furthermore, the archive’s publishers said that this program was in response to library doors being closed to the public during the pandemic. Under conditions where the Internet Archive was the only means of access to titles for many people, the policy was justified and a creative response to COVID-19.