The comments posted so far seem to miss both the ambition and innovation of the Internet Archive's efforts in recent years and the boldness of their new initiative. They developed a way to make in-copyright books available for free to anyone who wants to read them online: by keeping a physical copy of each book they scan, they can justify "lending" it to one person at a time online for a limited period. Their collection of scanned in-copyright books has been growing rapidly. Try searching at the Open Library for some popular book you enjoyed reading when you were younger—mystery, Western, young adult, science fiction—and they're likely to have a copy that you can "check out" and read in your browser. You even get to enjoy the yellowing of old paperback pages without the stench of the decaying paper.
The new initiative is bold both because it meets an urgent, unprecedented need—providing books to millions of people who are locked down and cannot go to libraries—and because it seems to be taking significant legal risks for the greater good. The announcement at archive.org links to a document [1] that in turn links to some attempts at legal justifications for the move. I'll let others weigh the merits of those arguments. I suspect, though, that if major publishers and other deep-pocketed copyright holders tried to contest it the Archive would have a difficult case on its hands.
The new initiative is bold both because it meets an urgent, unprecedented need—providing books to millions of people who are locked down and cannot go to libraries—and because it seems to be taking significant legal risks for the greater good. The announcement at archive.org links to a document [1] that in turn links to some attempts at legal justifications for the move. I'll let others weigh the merits of those arguments. I suspect, though, that if major publishers and other deep-pocketed copyright holders tried to contest it the Archive would have a difficult case on its hands.
[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vkl3RX4CzpRTQsoG1tsdHC0f...