Internet Archive Makes 1.4M Copyrighted Books Free, Gets Called Out For Piracy
Image via Stefan Holm / Shutterstock.com
As people stay indoors to contain the coronavirus, the Internet Archive has opened a ‘National Emergency Library’ consisting of 1.4 million free ebooks, including digital scans of contemporary titles like Stephen King’s The Shining, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, and Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher series.
The collection was mainly set up for students who require access to reading and research literature from home amid the COVID-19 crisis. A bulk of the titles are educational collections donated by libraries from Phillips Academy Andover, Marygrove College, and Trent University, according to Daily Dot.
While the Internet Archive has been letting readers “check out” digital scans for years, it imposed a virtual “borrowing” limit to the number of times a book can be browsed at any one time. With the “emergency library,” it has eradicated the waiting lists.
To the layman, this might be good news. However, authors have been crying “copyright infringement” and “piracy” over the move, as many did not give permission to have their work released for all to read—with zero royalties.
In a new blog post, the Authors Guild reminded that authors don’t earn much even on ordinary days. Then came the COVID-19 outbreak, which forced them to cancel book tours and took freelance commission work off their hands. Their livelihoods are further threatened now that the Internet Archive has posted their content for free, the organization added.
“IA is using a global crisis to advance a copyright ideology that violates current federal law and hurts most authors,” the Authors Guild wrote. “It has misrepresented the nature and legality of the project through a deceptive publicity campaign.”
Sci-fi author Chuck Wendig took to Twitter to label the Internet Archive as “A PIRATE WEBSITE.”
As much as it is deemed unethical to release someone else’s work without consent, the publishing quality of the content is notably not as appealing as the kind you’d download for, say, your Kindle.
The ebooks, as Daily Dot’s Gavia Baker-Whitelaw pointed out, are scanned copies and only offer 14 days of access to an Adobe file, or an encrypted DAISY format for readers with print disabilities. Readers will also require the right software to open the files.
Dear @NPR — uhh hey hi THIS IS A PIRATE WEBSITE. It’s not legit! WTF are you doing?! pic.twitter.com/Nmioke4aQK
— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) March 28, 2020
What the Internet Archive is doing right now--allowing unlimited downloads of books under copyright, for which they have not paid, and have no legal right--is not serving as a library. It's piracy.
— Seanan McGuire (@seananmcguire) March 29, 2020
[via Daily Dot, cover image via Stefan Holm / Shutterstock.com]
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