As Elizabeth A. Harris of the New York Times reported on Monday, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Wiley accused the nonprofit Internet Archive of piracy for making over 1 million books free online.
A group of publishers sued Internet Archive on Monday, saying that the nonprofit group’s trove of free electronic copies of books was robbing authors and publishers of revenue at a moment when it was desperately needed.
According to the complaint, Internet Archive has made more than 1.3 million books available free online, which were scanned and available to one borrower at a time for a period of 14 days. However, the group said in March it would lift all restrictions on its book lending until the end of the public health crisis, creating what it called “a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners.”
Philanthropy or theft?
In response, Maria A. Pallante, president of…
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Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
And, there are far more ethical ways to raise one’s profile as an author.
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An interesting idea, in theory, but they crossed a line. Greed will do that to you.
Besides, their argument that they need to exist because libraries are closed is horse-sh-hockey … libraries are still ‘open’ and doing very well, at least in my neck of the woods, because of ebooks – which incidentally the libraries pay for, through the nose, but that’s another story.
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Thanks for sharing well researched.
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Thanks for sharing, Chris! I’d love for them to distribute my books, to be honest. My enemy is obscurity, not piracy 🙂
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Theft… those books are not theirs to play with!
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