Elizabeth Harris

The nonprofit has said its National Emergency Library was a public service to people unable to access libraries during the pandemic, but publishers and authors accused it of theft.

A group of publishers sued Internet Archive, saying that the nonprofit group’s trove of free electronic copies of books is robbing authors and publishers of revenue at a moment when it is desperately needed. Internet Archive has made more than 1.3 million books available for free online, according to the complaint, which were scanned and available to one borrower at a time for a period of 14 days.