During the early part of the Covid epidemic the Internet Archive started sharing digital books that were still under copyright. Their reason was that all the public libraries were closed and they were helping to make books available to all. Publishers didn’t like that the books that they controlled were being made available for free. So they filed suit against the Internet Archive. Meanwhile as Covid eased up some the Internet Archive made it so that only one person at a time could view those books still under copyright. That didn’t satisfy the publishers.

The court case, like so many others, took a long time to come to trial and then there was an appeal. Internet Archive lost the right to make make most of the copyrighted digital books available. The publishers will be allowed to submit a list of their digital books and have them removed from the Internet Archive.

The judge in the case did favor Internet Archive in one respect. They only have to remove digital books by the publishers not all books currently in print by publishers.

Now Internet Archive is also coming under attack for their Great 78 Project which has digital audios of 400,000+ old 78rpm records. This time they are being sued by Sony and Universal Music Group who own the majority of the copyrights of music.The last release of 78s in the US was in 1958. The music publishers own the rights to the music because copyrights last so long. The Internet Archive says that on average, each recording in the collection is only accessed by one person per month. This new case should take a few years to be resolved.