The Authors Guild
Quote:
“The Internet Archive’s Open Library project will bring four million books online, through purchase or digitization, while honoring the rights of creators and expanding their online reach. Working with U.S. libraries and organizations serving people with print disabilities, Open Libraries can build the online equivalent of a great, modern public library, providing millions of free digital books to billions of people.”
But, contrary to their statement that they are “honoring the rights of creators,” they are not respecting creators’ copyrights. They do not limit Open Library to people with print disabilities. Rather, they are displaying and distributing full-text copies of copyrighted books to the entire world without authorization, in flagrant violation of copyright law.
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Society of Authors
Quote:
The Internet Archive is a San Francisco–based nonprofit digital library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. It seeks donations of hard-copy books from libraries and individuals and then scans, digitises, and offers them for lending and downloading without paying royalties or PLR.
According to our sister organisation the Authors Guild of America, while they have been doing this for some time they have recently posted a large quantity of scanned books (including works still in copyright) on their Open Library website.
Anyone can log-in, from anywhere in the world, search for and click on a book to 'check it out' for a period of two weeks. Although the site mimics regular library lending in that only one person can check out a book at a time, once checked out, the full text of the books can be easily downloaded; the site even provides download buttons to make it easy.
We did some spot-checking. Each author who was checked found that one or more of their in-copyright books were available in the Open Library for download.
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Australian Society of Authors
Quote:
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The ASA is deeply concerned by the practices of the Internet Archive's Open Library, which scans physical books and then makes those scanned copies freely available for lending to users all around the world, including Australia. By undertaking this activity without either seeking permission or providing fair payment to the creators, Open Library is undermining copyright law, legitimate ebooks sales and standard library practices.
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The Guardian Newspaper (UK)
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The Society of Authors (SoA) is threatening legal action against the Internet Archive unless it stops what the writers’ body claimed is the unauthorised lending of books unlawfully scanned for its Open Library.
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Ruckus appears to have been raised.