Veritas and Copyright: The Public Library in Peril

A response to the decision of Wiley Global to "disappear" 1,300+ of their ebooks in the ProQuest catalog at the beginning of the Fall 2022 term without any communication to university libraries at all, thus taking libraries by surprise and indicating Wiley's move away from libraries as repositories and lenders of their ebooks, passing on costs to students via increases in their student fees, described as "inclusive access" by Wiley, a troubling scenario indeed. This essay frames this aggressive move of Wiley's within the long history of copyright, the always successful litigious efforts of commercial publishers and even university presses & self-described "radical" presses to protect their copyrights against shadow libraries, so vital to the Global South, the life and death of Aaron Swartz and MIT's report on their potential responsibility for Swartz's prosecution and suicide, the current lawsuit led by Wiley against the Internet Archive, and the assaults on local libraries via book banning