The Internet Archive is ending its “free library” under copyright violation threats from publishers… Listen, I enjoy and benefit from the free culture movement, and I participate in it too, but it should be a choice of each copyright holder whether or not to join this movement, so my take is this whole shitshow was ill-conceived, naive, and doomed from day one.
Internet Archive is ending its program of offering free, unrestricted copies of e-books because of a lawsuit from publishers, which said lending out books without compensation for authors or publishing houses was “willful mass copyright infringement.”
Since March, Internet Archive, a nonprofit, has made more than 1.3 million books available online without restriction, calling them a National Emergency Library. It said the program was in place “to serve the nation’s displaced learners” during the coronavirus pandemic, and that it would keep the library open until June 30 or the end of the U.S. national emergency, whichever came later.
Bookninja 