this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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You mean the "basic library practice" of printing infinite copies of a book and handing them out for free to any patron who wants them?
I despise modern publishers and what copyright has become. But you did this to yourselves, Internet Archive. The publishers were willing to look the other way when you were acting in a similar manner to actual libraries with your digital lending practices, but you went and poked a bear and are now all shocked pikachu that it bit your leg off.
I would be a lot more sympathetic to Internet Archive here if they weren't putting a huge trove of actual internet archives at risk by pulling this stunt. They should have known exactly what was going to happen. Let groups like Library Genesis handle the pirate activism, IA, they're built around dealing with this kind of legal peril and surviving in the shadows. You're not.
That's not how their book lending works. There are a limited number of copies and they can only be checked out in a DRM-protected format. Unless you strip the DRM from them you cannot print them out.
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.