The Case for Fair Use in eBooks: The National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive, a Manhattan Law professor, and the Cornell University Professor of Digital and Internet Law
On the one hand, eBook licensing fees may impose a burden on libraries and reduce access to creative work. Authors have a right to compensation when their works are copied or distributed. The Copyright Act was balanced by Congress. We have to uphold the balance here.
The National Emergency Library was launched in March 2020 by the Internet Archive. Library closures caused by the pandemic had left students, researchers, and readers unable to access millions of books, and the Internet Archive has said it was responding to calls from regular people and other librarians to help those at home get access to the books they needed.
James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University, says the verdict is “not terribly surprising” in the context of how courts have recently interpreted fair use.