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Comment by ApolloFortyNine | Hacker News Reader

They lent unlimited copies. The limit is very very key to being covered under CDL.

Have you ever borrowed a digital book? It's for a limited period of time usually a couple weeks, in an app of some sort. That's what they did, that's CDL.

They temporarily removed waitlists which did allow more people to borrow a title than they had licenses, as physical libraries closed and as schools tried to get online. It was an unprecedented time. They had the support of major libraries. They stopped early when they got sued.

The lawsuit should be dropped.

These two statements contradict:

>It's for a limited period of time usually a couple weeks, in an app of some sort. That's what they did, that's CDL.

>They temporarily removed waitlists which did allow more people to borrow a title than they had licenses

That is not CDL, by definition (lending out more copies than they had licenses). Official source, March 30th: http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-responds...

Relevant quote: >And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection.

The article itself appears to be claiming this is not true: every book they lent was endorsed by a backing library, such that the physical book was guaranteed to be sitting in the stacks, not lent to anyone, whenever the digital copy of the book was in circulation.

This justification appears to have happened after the fact - As far as I can tell the endorsing library program postdates the National Emergency Library. They’ve never mentioned the endorsing library program in connection with the NEL until very recently that I can see.

Additionally, they explicitly waived all waitlists when they launched the program, and spoke about is as if controlled lending had been temporarily abandoned (whereas now they’re saying it was still CDL, just with a larger source pool). As far as I can tell, this is all a post-hoc attempt to make the whole affair more legal.

That could very well be true, I'm simply pointing out that OP appears to be stating as fact something that the article denies.

> Additionally, they explicitly waived all waitlists when they launched the program, and spoke about is as if controlled lending had been temporarily abandoned (whereas now they’re saying it was still CDL, just with a larger source pool). As far as I can tell, this is all a post-hoc attempt to make the whole affair more legal.

Well, obviously a post-hoc justification wouldn't make it legal. But on the other hand, if what they did was legal all along, the fact that they misleadingly described it at the outset in a way that made it sound illegal presumably wouldn't make it illegal.

It's not 100% clear to me what the justification is supposed to be. The article clearly seems to be implying that their lending was 1:1 with physical copies. If that's false, then obviously making this statement is not going to help their legal case, because the truth of it will be revealed in the course of the lawsuit. If it's true, then what was novel about their approach as discussed in the press release back in March? My best guess is that it has something to do with the physical libraries all being closed - that this enables more 1:1 lending because of the "650 million" books locked up, even if not each individual book was scanned separately. If that's not what they're claiming, I'm not sure what the point is.

Official source, March 30th:

http://blog.archive.org/2020/03/30/internet-archive-responds...

Relevant quote:

>And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection.

So it’s just to create artificial scarcity, this brings back the problem of piracy, what’s the difference between lending 100 copies vs 1M? Or why they charge more to “buy” a digital copy of a movie vs “renting” it? The key problem here is that we’re trying to adapt old models to a totally different medium like trying to attach the horses to a car.

And the problem was that by rushing into that without thinking we might end up much worse for wear after a judge thinks that digital sharing in general is totally bogus. You can't just try doing something to see if it works and then magically assume that people with entrenched interests won't come after you.

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