Judge, in IA’s Favor, Rules Injunction Applies Only to Books Available as Ebooks

U.S. District Judge John Koeltl for Southern New York in Manhattan resolved in Internet Archive’s favor the parties' dispute over the scope of the permanent injunction barring IA from scanning print copies of physical books and lending the digital copies to users of IA’s website without the publishers’ permission (see 2308140002), said his signed order Friday (docket 1:20-cv-04160). The “narrowly tailored” injunction will apply only to physical books that also have an ebook component, as IA wanted, said the order. The publishers wanted the injunction to cover all books in any format. The action concerned the unauthorized distribution of a select number of books, all of which were commercially available as authorized ebooks, said the order. “That fact was relevant” to the court's conclusion when it granted summary judgment in the publishers’ favor, finding IA was liable for copyright infringement, it said. An injunction covering all in-print books, including those the publishers haven’t made available for electronic licensing, risks going beyond the scope of the issues tried in the case, the order said. “What matters here” is that the case didn’t concern copyrighted works that aren’t yet available in electronic form, “and the parties therefore did not brief the legal issues related to such works,” it said.