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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

First, nobody gave them ownership of those copies.

Then who are the 130 partner libraries they are talking about?

https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/22/libraries-have-been-brin...

Over 130 libraries endorsed lending books from our collections, and we used Controlled Digital Lending technology to do it in a controlled, respectful way. We lent books that we own—at the Internet Archive and also the other endorsing libraries. These books were purchased and we knew they were not circulating physically.

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All of that happened after the fact. They didn’t try to work with libraries until after they got sued.

Also being endorsed by a library does not mean giving ownership of their physical copies.

Do you have to have ownership to lend out an item? If my friend owns a book and lends it to me, can I not lend it out to someone else during the period I'm expected to have it? I would expect what matters is who has control over the book at that specific time (in addition to any constraints put on the lending at the time it happened).

> If my friend owns a book and lends it to me, can I not lend it out to someone else during the period I'm expected to have it?

That isn’t what happened - in your metaphor: IA started lending friends’ copies without asking.

IA only after the fact got endorsements from libraries and they certainly didn’t have agreements in place giving them any inventory.

That could have been what happened. Their example didn't say they got their friend's permission prior to lending whatever was being lent to them. Even if it's after the fact, as long as they don't lend out too many copies they won't exceed what supporting institutions already have.

>Their example didn't say they got their friend's permission prior to lending whatever was being lent to them.

You think it is okay to lend out other peoples property? You need a serious reality check if so.

I think people are missing the distinction between what you are saying happened and the theoretical situation I was noting. I said lend out something someone lent to you, you are saying they didn't actually get lent anything, they lent out something they weren't yet lent.

What you're alleging they did is equivalent to someone going to their friend's house and taking something of theirs to lend to someone else without asking them. I agree that if that's an accurate assessment of what actually happened, it's a lot less defensible.

Interestingly, if you consider any physical thing, in none of those scenarios does the manufacturer of the thing that was lent or not lent—with or without permission—have any say-so with regard to the lending of that thing.

That's because we confer and infer specific rights in different situations there. Selling something confers ownership, and lending something confers right to use, possibly limited by stipulations at that time. Re-lending something may or may not be allowed depending on what the original lending agreement was. In the metaphor, limiting in this way is like your friend saying "here, but don't let anyone else use it, I trust you, not them" when it's lent. For businesses doing some sort of lending it's generally more complex and a contract (like what you sign when renting a car), and may or may not cover usage by other people.

I have no idea what limitations, if any, are put on the lending of digital goods by law or by the specific terms of IA, or the terms the other libraries in question offer.

> In the metaphor, limiting in this way is like your friend saying "here, but don't let anyone else use it, I trust you, not them" when it's lent. For businesses doing some sort of lending it's generally more complex and a contract (like what you sign when renting a car), and may or may not cover usage by other people.

Sure, but at no point does the producer of a physical object that is being lent get a say-so in the agreement between my friend and me, or the contract between a lending business and me.

In the car rental metaphor, it'd be like Ford suing Hertz for lending me a Focus that Ford already sold to Hertz.

It's not OK morally to lend something someone lent you without their permission, but I don't think it's copyright infringement either.

If the people you borrowed from say its OK after the fact then yes it is OK.

If I borrow a neighbours defibrillator, without asking, to save their child it would be insane for the manufacturer of the defibrillator to sue me for not buying my own defibrillator. While in theory the neighbour could object to me borrowing the defibrillator without permission, that does not appear to be what happened. Based on IA's statements it appears that libraries are saying after the fact that they were happy for their copies of books to be loaned by IA.

I would assume from their actions these publishers hoped to make a windfall on book sales when people were no longer able to access libraries and they saw IA's actions as attacking this potential profit. I can't think of any other reason why they would peruse their current course of action.

> IA started lending friends’ copies without asking.

That's relevant if the friends have grievances, but not so much the publishers.

> IA started lending friends’ copies without asking

And then it turned out the friends were fine with it anyway.

Regardless of the answer, that's not what happened.

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