[Rebelgecko]

This is pretty much why I stopped donating to them, not like they'll miss the sporadic $50 they'd get from me. Getting sued is a pretty obvious result of their decision to ignore copyright laws.

If they didn't realize that they'd be sued then they're hopelessly shortsighted (there's no "emergency" exemption to copyright laws, even if you can make the argument that morally there should be). If they did know that they'd be sued, the message they're projecting is that they have enough leftover money to burn that they can branch out from their core competencies and try their hand at legal activism.

[themitigating]

There are exceptions to copyright law: https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html

Maybe they're trying to set a legal precedent, which sounds great. I don't know why but I read your comment in such a negative tone.

"Rebel"gecko indeed

[Rebelgecko]

I don't really see how the ongoing pandemic would change the results of the fair use 4 factors test. I think the moral arguments in favor of IA's unrestricted lending are much more compelling than the legal ones (ofc I'm not a copyright law expert so I could be totally wrong).

Part of being a good rebel is to choose your battles wisely :) I think IA does a good job at that when they distribute abandonware or public domain materials. Trying to share unlimited copies of Harry Potter seems much more quixotic.

[capableweb]

> they can branch out from their core competencies

Being a library is their core mission and fighting what they are fighting now is one of the reasons I keep donating to them. I want them to be able to offer a digital library all over the world, this for me is the Internet Archive.

[dghlsakjg]

It doesn't seem as cut and dry as you make it seem.

Archival institutions are allowed to make digitized copies of legitimately owned works, and to allow access to that copy on their own "premises".

In the case of an organization like the internet archive which does not have physical premises, would you accept the argument that their 'premises' is the internet?

The question that they want answered is: where exactly is the line between looking at a scanned/microfiched/non-original archival copy of copyrighted material at the library, and viewing that same material over a network connection.

They weren't just handing out unlimited copies of books. They were distributing owned copies of books for exclusive temporary use. The method of delivery is different, but the end result is the same as checking a book out and leaving the library.

Just because public libraries signed shitty deals to get access to lending ebook licenses doesn't mean that the right to lend archival material over the network doesn't exist.

I would love for the courts to establish a first-sale doctrine that applies to digitized books, or that allows shifting a books format (buying a physical copy of a book and converting it to digital)

[Rebelgecko]

>They weren't just handing out unlimited copies of books.

I don't think that's accurate. This lawsuit didn't happen until they stopped enforcing the constraint that (# of concurrent digital loans) ≤ (# of physical copies IA and their partner libraries have). Thats very different from a regular library, where the number of copies they loan out can't exceed the number of copies they physically posses (or ebook licenses they have, which is a whole nother rabbithole).

[dghlsakjg]

Ahh. Thanks for that context. I thought they were just format shifting.

[ghaff]

There is a perhaps novel, perhaps not, argument to be made that virtually time-limited lending of a digital copy of a physical book you own is covered by first sale. May be a reason the publishers never pushed it.

There's also a whole other issue around scraping copyrighted public web pages in general but between being a non-profit archive, respecting robots.txt, and (at least mostly) taking pages down on request, TIA seems to have mostly skirted legal attention in that respect.

(Though it's probably a bit legally iffy. If I create an online comics museum and start hosting all sorts of syndicated content, I'm probably going to get a letter from a lawyer.)