A pandemic lending change drew a publisher lawsuit within months

The Internet Archive's own March 2020 notice and publishers' own statements record what changed and how fast.

Historical event

March 24, 2020

First source published

March 24, 2020

Site publication

September 18, 2026

The record

On 24 March 2020 the Internet Archive announced it would suspend the waitlists on its lending library, creating what it called a National Emergency Library. Its own blog post states the suspension covered “the 1.4 million (and growing) books” in the lending library, would run “through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later,” and was a response to inquiries from educators after school and library closures. The post quotes Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive's Digital Librarian, and Chris Bourg, Director of MIT Libraries, both framing the step as a response to closures rather than a change to the underlying lending model.

What the documents show

The Internet Archive's own post documents a specific, dated change to a specific practice: the removal of one-copy-one-user waitlists across its digitised collection for a bounded period. The response was immediate and adversarial. Three days later, on 27 March 2020, the Association of American Publishers issued its own statement, in which president and CEO Maria Pallante called the change “aggressive, unlawful, and opportunistic,” a characterisation the statement itself makes clear is AAP's own assessment rather than a court's finding at that point. The dispute moved from statement to litigation within roughly ten weeks: AAP's own press release states that Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons and Penguin Random House filed a copyright infringement suit against the Internet Archive in the Southern District of New York on 1 June 2020.

Why it stays interesting

The sequence is worth holding onto because it shows how quickly a practice change under emergency conditions can become the subject of formal litigation, and because the documents on each side describe the same event in incompatible terms: a service expansion for displaced learners, on the Internet Archive's account, against an unlawful attack on rights, on the publishers' account. This is an editorial point worth stating directly: a reader should treat the controlled digital lending theory underlying the waitlist suspension as contested rather than settled by either side's own statement, since the suit itself, not these announcements, is where that theory was later tested.

What to read next

A reader could next check the record of Hachette v. Internet Archive's 2023 ruling, which resolved the legal dispute this entry's documents only open, or the 2018 controlled digital lending position statement that library partners had already published before the pandemic-era suspension went further than that statement described.

• Does a described “emergency” change apply for a fixed, stated period, or indefinitely?
• Whose characterisation of an action, an organisation's own account or the opposing party's statement, is being repeated as settled fact?
• What legal theory was the practice built on, and was that theory tested in the litigation that followed?

The record here is unusually well dated on both sides: an announcement, a rebuttal, and a lawsuit filed within about ten weeks, a compressed timeline that leaves little room to treat any one of the three documents as the full account of what the change did.

Sources & reading trail

The Internet Archive's own announcement states the waitlist suspension, its scope and its planned end date, quoting Brewster Kahle.

Source published: 24 March 2020 · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

AAP's own statement, dated 27 March 2020, characterizes the change as 'aggressive, unlawful, and opportunistic.'

Source published: 27 March 2020 · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

AAP's own press release states four publishers filed suit in the Southern District of New York on 1 June 2020.

Source published: 1 June 2020 · Retrieved: 16 September 2026

Reports, filings, records and studies establish the entry; the reading of why it stays interesting is Chapter Ledger editorial analysis. This retrospective draft does not imply the site published on the event date.

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Published September 18, 2026, not on the date of the event described.