A group of major book publishers and the Internet Archive sparred before a New York federal judge Monday in a potential landmark copyright battle over the Archive's lending of digitally scanned books.
U.S. District Judge John Koeltl had pointed questions for the Archive during oral arguments about whether copyright law's fair use doctrine allows it to lend the scanned books without the publishers' permission.
The Archive compares its "controlled digital lending" of the copies to traditional library lending, while the publishers have called it a front for mass copyright infringement that hurts the ebook market for authors.
But it "elides the issue to say that this case is about the ability of a library to lend a book that it owns," Koeltl said. "Does the library have the right to lend a book that it owns? Of course! That's not the issue in the case." "You avoid the question of whether the library has the right to reproduce the book that it otherwise has the right to possess, which is really at the heart of the case," Koeltl told Gratz. "The publisher has a copyright right to control reproduction."
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