Oh this appeal to the public, pithy empty words about openness and shit.
Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk.
They said, there are enough physical books in closed libraries to cover their lending. That's not how this works. They should've asked the publishers for permission first if necessary putting pressure on them via public. This is not a case of it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission because they must have known they won't be forgiven for this. I can't even.
I am not saying this is by any means moral or right. I am saying: this is the law. They actually got relatively lucky for not being fined to oblivion for this.
This isn't about their pandemic actions, this is about the controlled digital lending they did for like a decade before COVID.
If it were just over the emergency library, the court would end the restrictionless lending and likely issue a fine. Instead, the court ruling was that CDL was illegal, and only mentioned the National Emergency Library to say "as CDL was already illegal, it was also illegal." There also would likely be a fine, but the case is being appealed.
IMO it's telling that publishers ignored the controlled limited lending that as you mentioned had been going on for a decade before COVID, and didn't file a lawsuit until IA started doing unrestricted lending.
My impression is that publishers were willing to look the other way when IA was distributing a small # of rare/out of print books, but once IA's homepage became unlimited copies of Harry Potter they felt like a line had been crossed.
They had been building up to a court case over that decade, including a 2019 open letter from most of the major players of the lawsuit. And if their problems were just with the NEL, they would have dropped things after the IA shut down the NEL.
The NEL was a PR boon for publishers, allowing the narrative to be "the IA deserved it for the few weeks they allowed a couple hundred copies of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe be unfairly borrowed." But it's irrelevant to the actual lawsuit.
Even if it presented an opportunity for them to pull the trigger, the publishers had their eyes on the lawsuit for years. The NEL may have been a mistake, but it's not relevant to the actual lawsuit.
Yup. Worse, people told them what that meant in terms of risk and begged them to reconsider, for the benefit of the larger archive.
And even worse, it was an epic strategic blunder. A campaign of "in this emergency, we would love to share books, but publishers don't agree" would've put massive pressure on publishers. They could've had a shot at advancing the legal situation of digital lending. Instead they opted for a publicity stunt.
Yes, sure, people couldn't go to libraries. That's when you collaborate with Project Gutenberg to address the actual need for reading material, highlight great free books, and keep hammering "and we could also lend you XYZ, if publishers only worked with us".
Then you reach out to publishers like Tor, who are already leaning further on the "unencumbered access" spectrum. And work out a deal with them. Promoting their books in return for larger lending count. Giving people the opportunity to buy additional copies for the digital library. (There's plenty of folks in the donor list)
And you continue saying "Hachette, HC, Wiley, and Penguin still don't want you to read their books".
Yes, what they did was the most idealistic approach. Sometimes, pragmatism is better in the long run.
AFAIK, the "borrowed" books on this platform weren't downloadable on the library site, merely viewable. Per TFA:
> "We use industry-standard technology to prevent our books from being downloaded and redistributed—the same technology used by corporate publishers," Chris Freeland, IA's director of library services, wrote in the blog. "But the publishers suing our library say we shouldn’t be allowed to lend the books we own. They have forced us to remove more than half a million books from our library, and that’s why we are appealing."
Is the "lend the books we own" part somehow inaccurate? I'm assuming IA has some sort of claim to the books they're lending and scanned, similar to any physical library. This seems very different from "a gigantic book piracy site".
Furthermore, I'd argue removing access to those books on IA will likely lead to one of the following:
A. people will fall back to actual piracy through other means to get the same content "even less legally" through well known alternatives
B. people simply not being able to access the content, e.g. if it's out of print , not available locally, or only available used for some exorbitant cost that wouldn't go to the publisher
C. people will spend whatever the publisher charges by buying from them directly
My understanding is that A and B are way more likely than C, since the vast majority of books on IA's website include out of print and hard to get books.
The emergency library wasn't what publishers sued over. They used it perhaps as a rhetorical cover but what they were actually suing to prevent is IA offering digital versions of scanned hardcopy books.
With IA's loss, publishers get to control the way libraries lend digital media because you can't take a hardcopy and legally "scan" it into a digital copy, so the only way to get a digital copy for lending is as a DRMed product from a publisher that does things like, for instance, expire after a certain number of loans.
Publishers considered scanned digital copies controlled by libraries to be a threat to their monetization efforts surrounding digital lending and they would eventually have sued IA regardless of the emergency library.
Moreover, the DRMed digital lending schemes that the publishers are "offering" libraries are very expensive compared to what a hardcover copy of the same work would have been, and publishers are increasingly vacuuming up libraries' entire budgets with excessive digital lending fees.
It's been observed that libraries would be illegal if they didn't already exist, and I think we're starting to walk down the road where they are illegal in the digital world.
> It's been observed that libraries would be illegal if they didn't already exist, and I think we're starting to walk down the road where they are illegal in the digital world.
I believe this is the crux of the attack by publishers. They don't want libraries to be able to buy books and lend them out. They want libraries to pay a huge monthly fee for every book lent.
All this could be avoided with some sensible legislation. Publishers should be prohibited from taking advantage of libraries, and some minimal compensation scheme should be offered for digital lending. Of course, that's not what companies want. It is the wild west of modern capitalism.
"Zediva thought it could circumvent the need to be licensed by literally renting customers a DVD and a DVD player, with your computer, tablet or Google TV as the remote control. Unlike the other streaming movie services, Zediva didn't turn a movie into a file on its servers that it can serve it to as many users as care to see it at once. Instead, Zediva’s servers had DVD drives and actual DVDs. So when you rented a movie, that disc goes out of circulation until you release it back to the company, just like in one of those increasingly rare real-world video stores."
The comments here about the lawsuit not being about the Emergency Library completely are technically true, but ignore this sentence. IA poked the bear with it's brazen actions.
> It was never legal.
Before this lawsuit, we weren't sure about this, but by provoking the lawsuit, we've forced the courts to make this decision.
Nitpick - I think if your DVD streaming service is free and single-person only, then you probably can - it would qualify under space or time shifting concepts. I don't think you have the right to monetize a DVD you purchase in general in the US, though.
Here's the plain truth: IA ran a gigantic book piracy site during covid. They should've known they won't get away with it. I remember several authors begging them not to do this because it affected their income. I personally thought it monumentally stupid to put the Wayback Machine at risk.
They said, there are enough physical books in closed libraries to cover their lending. That's not how this works. They should've asked the publishers for permission first if necessary putting pressure on them via public. This is not a case of it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission because they must have known they won't be forgiven for this. I can't even.
I am not saying this is by any means moral or right. I am saying: this is the law. They actually got relatively lucky for not being fined to oblivion for this.