Lawyers for four plaintiff publishers this week filed a blistering response to the Internet Archive’s demand for a decade’s worth of the

Publishers Blast Internet Archive’s ‘Extraordinary’ Demand for Sales Data

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2021-08-16 19:30:04

Lawyers for four plaintiff publishers this week filed a blistering response to the Internet Archive’s demand for a decade’s worth of the plaintiff publishers’ monthly sales data to use in its defense against charges of copyright infringement.

“In short, it is impossible to calculate the market harm of IA’s infringement based on the crude comparison IA proposes,” attorneys for the four publishers insist, adding that the IA’s “massive” demand “rests on no coherent foundation” and should be denied.

The filing comes after lawyers for the Internet Archive this week told the court it wanted monthly sales data for all the books in print from the four publishers dating back to 2011, in an attempt to show that it’s controversial program to scan and lend books has not had a negative impact on the market for the publishers’ books, a key component of its fair use defense.

But the plaintiffs counter that providing such data, which would involve “more than 500,000 titles” and an "enormous reservoir of highly proprietary data," would be costly, time-consuming, "burdensome in the extreme" and legally "irrelevant." Further, lawyers said the IA's contention that providing the data would not be burdensome was "preposterous."