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Comment by junon | Hacker News Reader

Genuinely curious, can you expand/link/whatever? I'd like to read up.

In the past, digital copies books at the internet archive that were still under copyright were treated somewhat like real physical books. IA would let people "check out" an ebook for a limited time period. The number of checkouts was limited by the number of physical copies of the book that IA or IA-affiliates (or I think even just individuals who pinky promised that they owned a copy of the book whose PDF they were uploading) had in their possession.

At the beginning of COVID, they started doing what they called the "National Emergency Library" (this is probably the best term to look up to find more articles and different takes on the topic), where they just let everyone download copies of Harry_Potter.epub. IMO this was a needless provocation and not surprisingly book publishers claim that this is copyright infringement. They're going a bit scorched earth in response- the lawsuit isn't limited to just the "uncontrolled lending" aspect of the program.

Just to clarify... it was less Hardy_Potter.epub and more textbooks and stuff for parents s who had to home school their children while losing their jobs and income... and public libraries closed, publishers not... supporting... any digital lending infrastructure before and during the lockdown (like mp3 and music industry, the industry was dragged kicking and screaming into the 21. century even when making a profit), they decided they need to compensate for the closed libraries by letting people lend freely...

I actually mentioned Harry Potter because when I went to their website after unrestricted lending was announced, the first thing I saw was literally a carousel of the entire Harry Potter series, followed by Stephen King's Dark Tower novels.

There were some textbooks (almost exclusively college level ones), but they were located at the bottom of the page below the bodice-ripper "Romance" category. The unrestricted lending wasn't limited to certain categories or anything like that.

AFAIK everything was included - yes, also Hardy_Potter.epub

Yes, I know but the reason they did take on the publishers was to fill the void of the closed libraries, who had books (and licences) but could not lend them as they were not open... I looked at the appreciation page of the emergency library during this whole mess, where they asked for use cases of their users and the overwhelming (anecdotal) tone was use for learning, uni, work and less free time - not that that would be a prob. But I understand the curiosity of why they took on publishers and looked into it when publishers first sent out the press release that they would sue... that is what I came up with after looking into it a bit... but interested in other views naturally :)

Personally I think that several things illegal should be legal, copyright should last about 30 years after death of author and so on.

But Internet Archive quite clearly and blatantly broke law - in situation where their operation were already on edge.

So there is no surprise at all that various entities used this occasion to sue them. Hopefully IA will survive, but I am not impressed by their strategy.

...the most beautiful errors auto correct does make... from time to time it is pure poetry...

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