Free-for-all vs copyright

It was initially presented as a rare and welcome sliver of good news for the literary world.

Last week, Internet Archive, a nonprofit group, announced that it would drop the access restrictions for its scanned books to make them widely available to readers during the coronavirus outbreak. Calling it “a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners”, the group said it would suspend the wait-lists for about 1.4 million books until the end of the public health crisis.

Some early positive coverage of the project noted that it was filling a void, making books accessible at a time