Communities around the world raced to respond to the coronavirus pandemic last month by shutting down as businesses, schools, and libraries were rendered unavailable seemingly in an instant. One of the effects of the shutdown was that hundreds of millions of books were immediately made inaccessible to students, teachers, and the wider community.  The Internet Archive responded with the National Emergency Library, a tweaked version of its Controlled Digital Lending program that brings scanned versions of millions of lawfully acquired books to readers under strict controls.

I’ve been a longstanding board member of Internet Archive Canada and was pleased to be joined on the podcast by Brewster Kahle (founder of Internet Archive), Chris Freeland (Director of Open Libraries at Internet Archive), and Kyle Courtney (lawyer, librarian and the copyright advisor at Harvard University) to talk about the Internet Archive, controlled digital lending, the National Emergency Library, and the copyright implications of recent developments.

The podcast can be downloaded here and is embedded below. Subscribe to the podcast via Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify or the RSS feed. Updates on the podcast on Twitter at @Lawbytespod.

Credits:

NBC Today, The Internet Archive Wants to be a Digital Library For Everything