In the Internet Archive Lawsuit, a Win for Publishers May Come at a Cost for Readers Everywhere
The US court’s decision means that digital lending has become a pressing question for libraries and readers

ON MARCH 24, the Internet Archive lost the copyright lawsuit that had been brought against it by four major publishers. The group—which comprised Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House—had sued early in the pandemic, shortly after the Internet Archive opened the National Emergency Library. The NEL was described as a crisis response to a world in which teachers and students were suddenly shut out of classrooms, librarians and researchers barred from the stacks, and the public unable to access large amounts of information. Containing more than 1.4 million books, the Internet Archive’s catalogue involved taking a single physical copy of a title, digitizing it, and making it available for mass download—without authorization by the publisher and author. Prior to the pandemic, many of these books had wait lists and download limits; the NEL was a temporary suspension of those limits. The Internet Archive claimed its move was protected under the doctrine of fair use, but the court didn’t buy it.

——

https://thewalrus.ca/internet-archive-books/

Not sure why they thought they’d get away with it under fair use, they clearly don’t meet the requirements:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Non-profit educational is a grey area. While one could argue every book teaches something, it’s probably not what the requirement measures and only applies to textbooks or something.

Uploading the entire work is obviously a no-no. The effect being that neither the publisher nor author is paid for the works.

During the pandemic, many publishers, authors, and other copyright holders did allow their works to be broadcast via YouTube. An example was Andrew Lloyd Webber, who allowed various musicals to be published on YouTube for a limited time (usually 48-72 hours). After the lockdown periods, some allowed the works to remain on YouTube, others did not.

Forgot the link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Divine Angel said:

Not sure why they thought they’d get away with it under fair use, they clearly don’t meet the requirements:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Non-profit educational is a grey area. While one could argue every book teaches something, it’s probably not what the requirement measures and only applies to textbooks or something.

Uploading the entire work is obviously a no-no. The effect being that neither the publisher nor author is paid for the works.

During the pandemic, many publishers, authors, and other copyright holders did allow their works to be broadcast via YouTube. An example was Andrew Lloyd Webber, who allowed various musicals to be published on YouTube for a limited time (usually 48-72 hours). After the lockdown periods, some allowed the works to remain on YouTube, others did not.

Yeah, much as I like the idea of being able to download all of absolutely anything for nothing, I have to confess to having some sympathy with Big Book here.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Divine Angel said:

Not sure why they thought they’d get away with it under fair use, they clearly don’t meet the requirements:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Non-profit educational is a grey area. While one could argue every book teaches something, it’s probably not what the requirement measures and only applies to textbooks or something.

Uploading the entire work is obviously a no-no. The effect being that neither the publisher nor author is paid for the works.

During the pandemic, many publishers, authors, and other copyright holders did allow their works to be broadcast via YouTube. An example was Andrew Lloyd Webber, who allowed various musicals to be published on YouTube for a limited time (usually 48-72 hours). After the lockdown periods, some allowed the works to remain on YouTube, others did not.

Yeah, much as I like the idea of being able to download all of absolutely anything for nothing, I have to confess to having some sympathy with Big Book here.

With an emphasis on the big. There are many people around the world who easily could spare the money to give everyone a free education.

roughbarked said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Divine Angel said:

Not sure why they thought they’d get away with it under fair use, they clearly don’t meet the requirements:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

Non-profit educational is a grey area. While one could argue every book teaches something, it’s probably not what the requirement measures and only applies to textbooks or something.

Uploading the entire work is obviously a no-no. The effect being that neither the publisher nor author is paid for the works.

During the pandemic, many publishers, authors, and other copyright holders did allow their works to be broadcast via YouTube. An example was Andrew Lloyd Webber, who allowed various musicals to be published on YouTube for a limited time (usually 48-72 hours). After the lockdown periods, some allowed the works to remain on YouTube, others did not.

Yeah, much as I like the idea of being able to download all of absolutely anything for nothing, I have to confess to having some sympathy with Big Book here.

With an emphasis on the big. There are many people around the world who easily could spare the money to give everyone a free education.

cough Amazon cough

not actually closely related to The Internet Archive at all but some similarities so apologies and please redirect if yous have a better place for this

Note: Archive.org, run by the Internet Archive, is uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.

¿ any of yous down with the wikipedia archivetoday issue ?

In January 2026, archive.today added code into its website in order to perform a distributed denial-of-service attack against a blog. This code uses the computers of visitors of the site to repeatedly send requests to the blog, with the goal of overwhelming the blog’s ability to handle legitimate traffic. The code is still present as of 19 February 2026. Some common ad blockers, such as uBlock Origin, are currently stopping these malicious requests. It was later discovered that archive.today tampered with archived web pages. It was also later discovered that this was not the first DDoS attack Archive.today has performed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidance#cite_note-RFC_ArchiveIs_Evidence-3

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer. “Archive.today uses advanced scraping methods, and is generally considered more reliable than the Internet Archive,” the Wikipedia request for comment said. “Due to concerns about botnets, linkspamming, and how the site is run, the community decided to blacklist it in 2013. In 2016, the decision was overturned, and archive.today was removed from the spam blacklist.” The DDoS attack being discussed by Wikipedia editors was targeted at the Gyrovague blog written by Jani Patokallio. Last month, “the maintainers of Archive.today injected malicious code in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack against a person they were in dispute with,” the Wikipedia request for comment says. “Every time a user encounters the CAPTCHA page, their Internet connection is used to attack a certain individual’s blog.”

(Redacted) Oh, and one interesting thing I observed: https://archive.today/2021.04.17-204557/http://ama-critic32.blogspot.com/2015/08/barney-live-in-new-york-city-video.html%23lace – the “Comment as: Jani Patokallio (Google)” string on this archive used to be “Comment as: Nora (Redacted) (Google)” (it appears as such in Google’s search results). sapphaline (talk) 13:39, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

If this is true it essentially forces our hand, archive.today would have to go. The argument for allowing it has been verifiability, but that of course rests upon the fact the archives are accurate, and the counter to people saying the website cannot be trusted for that has been that there is no record of archived websites themselves being tampered with. If that is no longer the case then the stated reason for the website being reliable for accurate snapshots of sources would no longer be valid. ―Maltazarian (talk ∨ {\displaystyle \lor }investigate) 15:28, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

I have another evidence of tampering: this is a Megalodon archive of a archive.ph archive of a post. The original post is now dead. Patokallio mentions this post in his blog – he would surely mention if the post mentioned him, in the way the archived version does. He quoted the original “ was a woman”, while the archive.ph reads “Jani Patokallio was a woman” Janhrach (talk) 07:44, 19 February 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, honestly this situation has gotten me thinking about Wikipedia’s archive practices as a whole. It’s a bit concerning that one of the core pillars practically has a single point of failure. Ideally we want our sources to be clearly published secondary sources, but in reality a large chunk of all citations on Wikipedia are online-only articles from small publishers. They need archiving to be stable sources, but the archives we de facto rely on are third-party and could in theory shut down today if they felt like it. It’s not like there’s some brilliant magical solution to this though. — Maltazarian (talk) 05:41, 9 February 2026 (UTC)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Archive.is_RFC_5#Evidence_of_altering_snapshots

also incidentally

In July 2013, archive.today began supporting the API of the Memento Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Due to budget constraints at LANL, the Memento Project was disestablished in September 2025.