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Comment by themodelplumber | Hacker News Reader

By media-constrained I'm referring to the fact that, as far as I could tell, once you checked out one of these books, there was no way to grab a PDF and run. There was no way to grab an EPUB and bob's your uncle, you're in Kindle or iBooks and reading your text. This constitutes an easily validated, qualitative, experiential difference from what parties to the case are implying. If this isn't the case, let me know.

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That's not what the publishes are implying at all. They could care less about the technicalities of whether the IA copies were ePubs or Mobis or whatever.

The publishers are saying that, regardless of the form of media, the IA engaged in uncontrolled digital lending, meaning that they lent out more digital copies of books than they actually owned, digitally or physically (or that were lent to them by their so-called partner libraries either digitally or physically). Because they did not actually own or possess the copies underlying these loans, they were required by copyright law (in the US and the EU) to either acquire more physical copies or to license more digital copies.

"Uncontrolled digital lending" seems a very strange term for

* lending in specified forms, which require illegal activity to make further copies, and

* lending for a specified time, which requires illegal activity to extend.

Welcome to NewSpeak, where "uncontrolled" means fairly tightly controlled.

Controlled Digital Lending is a well established term meaning one physical copy for each copy digitally lent. This lent more than the physical copies, so it was “not controlled digital lending”. There is little linguistic difference between “not controlled” which is awkward and “uncontrolled.”

Uncontrolled does not have to mean zero restraints. The word never meant that. Especially in a well defined context where controlled has precise meaning (and that meaning is not “every constraint”). Neither word need mean the absolute extreme.

This is not NewSpeak.

There is considerable difference between "uncontrolled" and the status of digital books lent by the "national emergency library". For one thing, all of those copies have expired and are unusable to either the person who checked them out or anyone else without illegal actions by those people. To argue that these digital copies are, or were, "uncontrolled" is ridiculous and quite inverts the meaning of "uncontrolled".

Ironic to me that it is completely possible to make pdf copies of a physically borrowed book, and at least in academia making physical copies of chapters of books was extremely common and one of the primary uses of photo copy machines.

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