National Emergency Library

The National Emergency Library is a temporary collection of books provided by the Internet Archive that supports emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation while universities, schools, training centers, and libraries are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Internet Archive announced the initiative on March 24, 2020. It immediately saw mainstream news coverage, from like likes of NPR and Wired.

In practice, the Internet Archive provided these resources before the pandemic, but with a waitlist system that allowed only one person to check out each book at one time. The National Emergency Library disabled the waitlist functionality on every book, allowing anybody to view any of the books at any time. The National Emergency Library program originally planned to continue until the end of the COVID-19 pandemic or June 30, 2020, whichever would be later (that is, COVID-19). In response to the lawsuit, the program will end on June 16th.

The National Emergency Library collection is here. It contains 1.3 million texts.

The Internet Archive Blog provides weekly updates on the status of the National Emergency Library under the 'NEL' tag. After two weeks, the Archive released a status report assessing how people practically used the books. It also highlights stories about how the NEL is being used worldwide. For example, to provide the required reading for schools in the island nation of Aruba.

Justifications
Legally, the Archive said they were promoting access to those inaccessible resources, which they claimed was an exercise in Fair Use principles. The Archive continued implementing their Controlled Digital Lending policy that predated the National Emergency Library, meaning they still encrypted the lent copies and it was no easier for users to create new copies of the books than before. An ultimate determination of whether or not the National Emergency Library constituted Fair Use could only be made by a court. Morally, they also pointed out that the Internet Archive was a registered library like any other, that they either paid for the books themselves or received them as donations, and that lending through libraries predated copyright restrictions.

Opposition
Many authors of copyrighted books were incensed by their books' inclusion in the National Emergency Library. They believed it was not a Fair Use and was, therefore, copyright infringement. The Internet Archive's promotion of access to resources often encounters such criticism.

At launch, the Archive provided an email address for authors to use to get their books removed if they wanted them gone. This bypassed the usual and more laborious DMCA takedown process. After various authors and publishers publicized their objections to the NEL, and encouraged others to opt out, the email process bogged down somewhat, and Jason Scott took to Twitter to provide a faster response to authors, sometimes being able to take books within minutes of receiving requests.

University presses initially bristled with the National Emergency Library. The Archive held a community call with them to hash out their concerns.

An association of corporations, authors' lobby groups, and authors sued the Internet Archive over the National Emergency Library.