Four publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House) sued the Internet Archive after it created a National Emergency Library that ran from March 24, 2020, to June 16, 2020, under its Controlled Digital Lending program (CDL) . This was a temporary book collection created from thousands of e-books and was intended to provide reading matter to people in lockdown when physical libraries had to close during the early stages of the pandemic. Although libraries have been allowed to create and lend out one electronic version (i.e., scanned) for every physical book it owns (in lieu of lending the physical copy, not in addition to), for the National Emergency Library the Internet Archive was lending out multiple copies of a digital book at once , and the four publishers sued over a number of their books included in the collection. The Internet Archive claimed they were operating under the fair use doctrine , but the publishers have sued for mass copyright infringement . O...

Photo credit: Owen Moore Ownership manifests itself in many ways. Take for instance a cold. Not long ago, someone I knew had one. When speaking about it, I referred to it as her cold. Then, when I soon caught the germ, my husband actually called it my cold. Hearing him say that at first seemed strange, until I realized the cold's ownership had now been transferred to me, along with the responsibilities of trying to get better and not sharing the germ with others. Here are a few examples of how a writer can take ownership: A writer needs to own up to mistakes. It would be wonderful to believe every word we write is perfect, but, actually, that's not really the case. We need to own up to our mistakes, learn from them, and polish our prose. We can do this by either hiring an editor, or at least by submitting our work to some darn good beta writers. Okay, the book is done. Before it's released, although in the U.S. original works have been automatically copyrighted ...