Citing the August 11 and August 16 Press Releases by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), publishers Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Penguin Random House, and Wiley, along with the Internet Archive (IA), jointly proposed a consent judgment to the U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York in the case of Hachette Book Group, et al, v. Internet Archive. This proposal followed the court’s ruling on March 24, 2023, finding IA liable for copyright infringement. The proposed judgment, which the District Court approved, includes a stipulated permanent injunction that prevents IA from offering unauthorized copies of the Plaintiffs’ books using the concept of “controlled digital lending.”
Reacting to the approval Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) said
“We are extremely pleased that the district court has approved the proposed consent judgment. As we have stated before, it is an appropriately serious bookend to a decisive finding that so called “controlled digital lending” is nothing more than copyright infringement.”
Upon submission of the negotiated judgement Maria A. Pallante, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), had stated the following, on behalf of the Plaintiffs and AAP’s Board of Directors: “This comprehensive proposed consent judgment—made possible by the District Court’s unequivocal infringement finding—underscores the public purpose of copyright law and the well-established rights of authors and publishers to license and communicate their works to readers through a variety of formats and delivery models. “
She also stated: “To this end, we are extremely pleased to have secured broad injunctive relief in the proposed consent judgment, which will extend not only to the Plaintiffs’ 127 works in suit but also to thousands of other literary works in their catalogs representing countless other authors” and announced that “the Association of American Publishers and IA have executed an ancillary agreement that goes beyond the four corners of the lawsuit, to motivate IA to apply the injunction in the consent judgment to all of the AAP’s member companies affected by IA’s infringement, creating an efficient resolution for these aggrieved rightsholders.”
The day following the submission of the negotiated judgment, Reuters reported on record labels Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filing a lawsuit against Internet Archive, alleging copyright infringement due to its streaming archive of digitized music from old records.