The Internet Archive is starting to run out of legal options. Wired reports that the non-profit internet cataloguer of videos, games and books lost its appeal in the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The court rejected Archive.org’s claim in its ongoing lawsuit with several high profile book publishers that its virtual library of books can legally operate under the fair use doctrine.
The lawsuit stems from the online archive’s National Emergency Library (NEL) that launched in March 2020. The NEL helped readers access library materials during the COVID pandemic with digitized copies of books that users could check out one at a time. Sometime later, the Internet Archive allowed users to check out an unlimited number of e-books and authors like Colson Whitehead and Neil Gaiman as well as the Authors Guild condemned the NEL, according to NPR.
The website reinstated the book borrowing caps but it didn’t stop publishers like Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Random House from filing
