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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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That's now their book lending is supposed to work. But they didn't do that. This lawsuit was launched when the Internet Archive started up the "National Emergency Library", which instead operated as I described above. There were no limits on how many people could "borrow" the book at the same time, which kind of breaks the whole "borrowing" analogy at a fundamental level.
Again, I think modern copyright law is berserk and modern publishing houses are scum. But when you are carrying a precious archive of information and you go up to some berserk scum and poke them with a stick I think I'm just as angry at the poker as I am at the scum.
But those are only during the pandemic, right? Not indefinitely?
Why does that make a difference? They were making copies, that's copyright violation. The pandemic didn't suspend copyright law.
The internet archive were probably counting on publishers goodwill to temporarily allowing relaxed lending rule. It's not like they were distributing unlocked copies anyway (each copy expire in a few days IIRC thanks to DRM). Turns out the publishers don't have any empathy even during pandemic and blow it out of proportion, as if the internet archive was turning into libgen and distributing unlocked pdf to everyone on the internet.
My own personal theory is the internet archive is not afraid of getting shut down and testing the water to see how far they can get away with poking the copyright law. They must have a contingency plan in case their non-profit organization got shut down to ensure its archive preservation in order to be this brazen.
I hope they learned a valuable lesson. A valuable, expensive, obvious lesson.
It's not like those copies self destructed after the pandemic.
But it is. The ebook contains drm and can only be opened with adobe software. It can't be opened anymore once the lending time expired. The internet archive simply allowed more people to borrow them, but not letting them borrow the books indefinitely so the lent books will still expire (though they can still re-borrow again by logging in to the internet archive library).