I'll also note I amusingly mixed up IA with AI, such that I was very confused on how the story was relevant to the headline here. :D
You don't need to swear. Textbook publishers already have done. I'm sure conventional publishers would too, if they imagined for a moment they could get away with it.
https://www.universitystar.com/opinions/opinion-textbook-acc...
The publishers would like the IA to stop doing that. If the IA wants to keep offering things which are out of copyright or which the copyright owners aren't going to challenge, great. Go for it. This isn't an assault on the concept of a library which is what the IA is trying to pretend. It's a challenge on the IA's pretense that they are a library and not a stock of pirated books, amongst other items.
This was only true for a twelve-week period at the height of the pandemic, it hasn’t been true since then.
I dispute that. I did some work with a large book publisher in the UK. They hated libraries and had all sorts of tactics to work against them.
1) The ebooks available through IA's Open Library are offered under a controlled lending scheme similar to a commercial service like OneDrive and Amazon. Users are limited to 10 books at a time, and can borrow the items for up to 14 days. After that period, the ebooks -- which use Adobe's DRM tech -- are disabled.
2) The number of "copies" available for lending are restricted to the actual number of physical copies that IA has in storage, permanently out of circulation.
3) Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan and the rest of the publishing industry is fairly hell-bent on "squashing lending" that doesn't happen through their exclusive and extremely lucrative ebook channels. The steep increases in pricing along with tightening restrictions on access have public library institutions such as the ALA concerned about the very existence of book lending in the future.
4) In their PR blitz, the publishers talk a lot about the "National Emergency Library," which did allow for unlimited lending during a 12-week period at the beginning of the pandemic; but the suit is not confined to this short-lived program.
Ah yes, the "it's your own fault we want to end libraries" approach. If they had their way, the only "fair use" left will be through time-restricted DRM after paying a licensing fee.
The "assault on the concept of a library" thing isn't from this specific lawsuit, but just general publisher behavior. The publishers want libraries to become a shittier Netflix for books - i.e. the last rung on a very tall windowing[0] ladder, with them being paid per rental and books being able to be pulled from circulation at a whim. This is Literally Nineteen Eighty-Four.
A good parallel for this would be the Epic v. Apple lawsuit. Legally speaking, there was no way in hell a private company was going to get standing for an expansive, Stallmanesque antitrust lawsuit against the very bedrock of platform capitalism. And morally, Epic is a worse company than Apple. However, practically speaking, their ability to get discovery woke every legislative body up to a lot of industry dirty laundry. The EU Digital Markets Act would not have passed without Epic v. Apple airing all that out.
If IA is able to get discovery, they could do something similar for book publishing. Just put all that dirty laundry out in front of the public and let them make sense of it.
[0] The practice of releasing creative works in stages. Think like how movies go from theaters, to home video, to rental or streaming, to airplanes, in roughly that order.