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Comment by jijji | Hacker News Reader

how does a library get away with it.... they have to purchase the book first? is that how it works? how is internet archive different from a library, A lot of libraries are online right now and do the same thing.... It seems like a real harm if internet archive is forced offline because of a decision like this

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>how does a library get away with it.... they have to purchase the book first? is that how it works?

Yes. And they can lend those books to people due to the first-sale doctrine, which allows the legal owners of a work to lease, lend or sell it without the copyright owner's permission.

this definition also seems to fit what libraries were doing, lending out their copy, sometimes digitally, sometimes in person, always only 1 copy at a time

the judge said the conversion to digital was not transformative, so I don't see why it should constitute another work versus the original one

Legally speaking, what the Internet Archive was doing is exactly what copyright law prohibits: making and distributing an unauthorized copy of the book.

The first sale doctrine (which libraries depend on) says you're allowed to to sell, rent out or give away your own physical property, even if that property happens to be an embodiment of a copyrighted work. It doesn't say anything about it being legal to make another copy of a work, and then distribute it while you keep the original one for yourself.

that still doesn't really explain Google's position.

Google never lent out entire copyrighted books without the publisher’s permission. Books.google.com consisted of 1) old public domain books that can be fully downloaded, 2) limited preview books that the publisher opted into putting online partially, and 3) snippet view books that only showed a sentence of context in response to search queries. The Authors’ Guild sued over 3), Google argued that they transformed the book into a search index, not a reading experience, and Google won.

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