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>In addition, I thought the justification for expanding controlled digital lending was around COVID-19, not rights for people who have low vision. Was this issue a central part of the the IA's reasoning before the lawsuit?

They're grasping at straws and trying to see what protections they might to be able to slip under, since what they wrote in their announcement is a slam dunk case against them [0].

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

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

> It is not a politically motivated campaign to destroy books

You don't consider a legal dispute over copyright to be political?

It's political but it's not capital-P political.

Politics is a sufficiently broad idea that virtually all the machinery of society would qualify, but what's being spoken about here is the kind of politics that has to do with propaganda and information control. And indeed, this is not that.

There are many different usages of the word. The one in legal theory that, for example, is used by courts to exclude cases of a "political" nature is of course different from the one used in academia or else all cases would be forbidden!

I think copyright is about information control.

I'm not trying to be pedantic, I just don't think there's much difference between "Politics" and politics, and filing a lawsuit is a clearly political act. Politicians write laws so that they can be used in court. Even more straightforward-seeming court cases, like murder trials, are political in that the government can't apply every law to every person all the time, so it has to make political decisions about what laws and what people to focus on.

In this case, a large organization is asking the court to interpret a law that effects a huge portion of American society and determines when and how information can be spread. In the US, the court's interpretation of a law is as important if not more important than the legislative process that created the law.

I really can't see a resemblance here with the kind of nefarious machinations with an agenda that are being referenced.

Copyright doesn't really control or distort the flow of media or ideas in a way that favors any particular politics.

I think NoSorryCannot is making a distinction between object-level political motivations (ie, the books themselves are political and the burners wish to deny people access specifically to the viewpoints represented within) versus meta-level political motivations (the burners want to establish a precedent that they are entitled to burn books, but don't have any particular objection to the content of said books).

The lawsuit seeks to force the Internet Archive to delete all the copies of scanned books, including the copies of books they physically own. This is in addition to preventing them from lending out scanned copies. How is that not book burning?

I do not personally have the problem, but I believe the accommodations necessary for many people with low vision to read a book are easier with an electronic copy of the book; i.e. zooming in on a PDF rather than using a book magnification station---effectively a book scanner without memory. And yes, this has been one of the goals of IA's book scanning program for quite a while.

Ray Bradbury died in 2012. I don't think you can freely make the association that because he supported the SFWA, he would have supported their stance on this.

> It is not a politically motivated campaign to destroy books, or a witch hunt to root out deviant social or religious teachings. It's a dispute over copyright law.

Copyright law was created as a means to root out “scandalous books and pamphlets”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright#Conception

Are the origins relevant? I don't think copyright is typically used for those purposes today

Sometimes it is. Just look at how Disney uses copyright to keep its earliest animations under wraps (the ones modern viewers might find somewhat offensive).

> justification for expanding controlled digital lending was around COVID-19, not rights for people who have low vision. --

My memory tells me it was both. With libraries closed they were not able to provide adequate access to those with disabilities.

Again nearly all library systems already have a digital lending system in place

Having system in place (90% of libraries do) doesn't mean all or even most of the books they have physical copies of are available in digital form. The question isn't whether libraries can lend digital books but if they are able to lend the same ones IA did. Just because 90% of people are capable of running doesn't mean that they can run as fast as Usain Bolt.

Here is a searchable collection of the books available to libraries from Rakuten Overdrive, the most popular digital lending system in the US (IIUC).

https://www.overdrive.com/explore

If you search for Charles Ross' Edward IV (https://archive.org/details/edwardiv00ross), you find:

https://www.overdrive.com/media/3099728/edward-iv

which lets you find if your library has a copy or to find a library that does. It's a trick. "There are no libraries with this title available that match your search criteria [my search criteria was 'all libraries']."

How about Sailors and Scholars: The centennial history of the U.S. Naval War College (https://archive.org/details/sailorsscholarsc00hatt)? It's not available from OverDrive. But then it's been donated to the IA and is freely available. But I'll bet the publishers want it deleted anyway.

Or Introduction to Information Retrieval? I would advise trying to borrow it as it's probably very out of date, but still kind of interesting. OverDrive lists it (https://www.overdrive.com/media/179471/introduction-to-infor...), but no libraries have it. Neither does the IA. Maybe I should scan and donate my copy.

I don't see what Bradbury has to do with that. Yeah, he wrote a book that involved book burning (which he argued wasn't the main point anyway), but that doesn't make ghosts people have of him in their minds the final say on the subject.

> Was this issue a central part of the the IA's reasoning before the lawsuit?

Have we ever received a breakdown of how these decisions were made by IA? Was this a single person shooting from the hip? Or the product of a deliberative process?

> I believe that Ray Bradbury, were he alive today, would have likely come out against this characterization.

Bradbury was against ebooks so he would have been against the whole thing.