On September 4, 2024 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled against the Internet Archive. In so doing the Second Circuit upheld the March 2023 ruling of the U.S. Southern District Court of New York in Hachette v. Internet Archive that scanning copyright-protected books to deliver free digital copies online is not protected under fair use and therefore violates copyright law. The Second Circuit court found that the reproduction and distribution of the works was not transformative, while agreeing that the e-lending program was noncommercial in nature. Despite the Internet Archive’s nonprofit status, the court found that the program usurped the commercial market that rightfully belonged to the copyright holders, including authors of both fiction and non-fiction works. In fact, the opinion found that all four factors of fair use weighed against the Internet Archive.

In December 2024, the Internet Archive announced that it would not appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, thus ending a dispute that began in March 2020 in the early days of COVID. The Internet Archive also announced that it will continue to honor the Association of American Publishers (AAP) agreement to remove books from lending at the request of member publishers.

Since 1996 the Internet Archive has built a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form to provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, people with print disabilities and the general public. Currently the Internet Archive has 28+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and works with 1,200+ library and other partners to identify important web pages. For more information on the Internet Archive see https://archive.org/about/.