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I love the Internet Archive but they are pretty clearly legally in the wrong here.
Not morally, mind. I support open access to knowledge. But they very clearly broke copyright law here.
Yeah I agree. I wasn’t totally following what they were doing but;
- If they bought 100 copies of a book, lent them out digitally 1:1 (lend out 1, now 99 are available to borrow), then this whole case is horseshit.
- If they were doing… pretty much anything else, yeah, they’re not lending, they’re copying. Pretty cut-and-dry bad-take on IA’s part.
Disclaimer; this opinion is from someone who both 1: believes that all media should be freely distributed and 2: is an aspiring writer (and current artist, and former cartoonist). Yes, I recognize that there is cognitive dissonance there, in the context of being able to support myself creatively.
It’s the latter. And even worse, they couldn’t claim ignorance or accident, because they were previously using the former system. They had a system set up which only allowed a certain number of licenses to be in use at any one time. When someone checked out an ebook, it was unavailable to anyone else. This is standard practice for libraries.
Then IA intentionally went out of their way to disable this licensing system, and allowed unlimited downloads. It was the worst of both worlds, because it meant they were violating copyright and they took active steps to remove those copyright protections. They couldn’t go “sorry we didn’t know” and get off with some finger waggling and a “don’t do it again”, because they had gone out of their way to intentionally disable the licensing system. They knew exactly what they were doing. Instead, the courts threw the book at IA, because it was an open-and-shut case of blatant and intentional copyright violation.
I’m pretty sure it’s number 2. They originally had a limit on the number of people who could read something at one time (likely to match the number of licenses they held), but during the pandemic, they lifted this limit and let an unlimited number of people read it.
Literally just read that in another thread. Apparently publishers let them do this during the pandemic, but when asked to go back after the pandemic, they refused.
How braindead are they, that they thought they could do this without consequence? It’s not like it was a “hope they don’t notice” thing; they were in direct communication with the publishers.
Yup. Pretty much anyone who knew anything about copyright law agreed that they were making a monumentally stupid move. And their only defense basically boiled down to “bUT wE’rE a LiBRarY.” Which completely ignores the fact that even libraries need to comply with copyright laws for ebooks, via licensing agreements with the publishers.
Now apply this ruling to spicy autocorrects.
