The Atlantic – Knowledge is too precious to be abandoned to the whims of the profit motive. “By collecting and digitizing such a huge collection of works and lending them out online, the Internet Archive is making an incredible social contribution. The way the nonprofit manages that archive, however, has earned the wrath of book publishers. A few months into the coronavirus pandemic, when many physical libraries were closed, the IA began partnering with libraries to give users access to the IA’s collection, and removed digital limits on its lending. Several book publishers sued in June 2020, alleging a violation of copyright; the IA discontinued the practice a short time later. Last month, a federal court sided with the publishers; Judge John G. Koeltl wrote that the IA had simply “copied the Works in Suit wholesale for no transformative purpose and created ebooks that … competed directly with the licensed ebooks of the Works in Suit.” The ruling went beyond this to say that controlled digital lending, or CDL, violates copyright law. That’s significant, because for the past decade or so, many U.S. libraries have engaged in CDL, by which a limited number of digital copies, based on the number of physical copies a library possesses, are loaned out. Users lose access to these digital copies after a set period of time. The crux of the publishers’ complaint is that they want to charge libraries fees for ebooks, and they can’t do that if the Internet Archive is allowing those libraries to loan out its scanned copies for free. The ebook licenses that publishers sell to libraries, by contrast, have to be renewed after a fixed number of loans or a certain period of time, and they are highly profitable…” [h/t Barclay Walsh]