Hi everyone,

I thought there was more than one flair that could have possibly be used for this article.

If someone have a better suggestion, please let me know.

Makes sense to me.

Thanks for the feedback!

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 81%. (I'm a bot)

> On Friday, a US district judge ruled in favor of book publishers suing the Internet Archive for copyright infringement.

> Publishers suing-Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley-had alleged that the Open Library provided a way for libraries to avoid paying e-book licensing fees that generate substantial revenue for publishers.

> In court documents, IA argued that rather than cutting into publishers' library e-book licensing revenues, the Open Library helped promote books, and that practice ended up generating more licensing revenues for publishers in recent years, as thousands of IA borrowers widely recommended books they read. IA also argued that OverDrive checkouts did not increase when IA stopped lending the disputed books in the lawsuit.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: publish^#1 Library^#2 book^#3 IA^#4 licensing^#5

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Faith in the system restored. Blatant stealing of content like that is just not okay.

>Kahle said in a statement. “For democracy to thrive at global scale, libraries must be able to sustain their historic role in society—owning, preserving, and lending books.

Libraries already do this with physical book like they've always done. With digital is different

Sad to see data not be sufficient evidence. Publishers aren't losing anything, other than potential ambassadors and fans

I feel the brush of a sea breeze in my cheeks.

Pretty much the outcome I expected. It's hard to argue copyright law as written wasn't firmly on the side of the publishers, especially once internet archive moved away from distributing the works digitally on a strict 1:1 basis with a physical copy.

(and before anyone says it, I'm not taking the publishers' side here, but the law is the law.)

Losing something wasn't the only relevant point of law at issue here though.

The issue here was that libraries aren't able to own these books though because publishers refuse to sell them the digital copies.

Personally, I think IP law as written was on the publishers' side here (for better or worse), but the issue is that libraries are being left in a fundamentally different position in terms of e-books than they were with physical copies.

If you can buy a digital book, you can lend a digital book. Same as physical book.

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As an individual perhaps, but libraries have long had to buy their books (and other media) at the special (much higher) rate intended for lending/rental institutions.

There's also the issue that in this case internet archive had moved away from distributing copyrighted material on a strict 1:1 basis with a corresponding physical copy so this particular case was more complex than the lending of personal property.

Ahoy

> There's also the issue that in this case internet archive had moved away from distributing copyrighted material on a strict 1:1 basis with a corresponding physical copy so this particular case was more complex than the lending of personal property.

The judge ruled that this was irrelevant though, which was really stupid. Buying 1 copy should mean that you have one copy to lend out through physical or digital means. It shouldn't matter what form it was in when you bought it.

Unfortunately, that's not how IP law works though. Different copies come with different licenses as far as what you can do with them. It is what it is.

It's not that hard to argue it was legal. The IA had some pretty solid arguments backed by some fairly well known copyright lawyers. If you read the break down of the case and all the precedent the IA cited and the judge ignored to come to his ruling I think you'd be a bit surprised.

It's not really shocking that the IA lost but that the judge ruled so firmly against them and rejected almost every argument they made in full was a surprise. The appeal will be interesting as he certainly gave the AI plenty they can cite for why his ruling was incorrect.

FWIW I have read through the case extensively. I'm no legal expert, but it seems to me that IA's case was largely based on arguments about how copyright should work rather than how it does work.

No, not really correct. It was more like IA's arguement was based on multiple former cases being true rather than any one case being an exact match for what they did. For example they argued they can make digital copies of books and cited the Supreme Court case about video taping TV shows. The supreme court ruled copying TV shows was legal where as in this case the judge ruled copying books into a digital format was illegal.

The important thing to note here is this isn't even getting into the issue of the IA sharing books it digitized. That part was just about the act of copying them into a digital format in the first place.

It was honestly a surprising ruling because of how completely he ruled against the IA. The end result could have ultimately been the same even if he agreed with the IA on some points but he didn't which was a real surprise.

I always ask my classmates for a PDF copy of our textbooks on the first day of class, even if I already have the book, just so others can piggyback on my request.

ARrggg

This is such a shame - Libraries would not exist with this interpretation.

We can agree that the law is bad but we then need to first change the law. We can't just break laws that we disagree with

It's not the same though. You can't lend a digital book, you can only copy it. The actual electrons that represent the book in your memory drive are copied over every time you "lend it" so it is not quite the same as with the physical book.

When you buy a physical book, you're also not allowed to make copies of it