There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit. It’s a small part of the lawsuit, but it’s clear it pushed them to go to war against IA.
Publishers spent millions of dollars developing digital lending platforms with fewer features and worse ROI than CDL, and then bullied libraries into adopting them.
This is a reasonable summary of their pre-IA activities:
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...
> There absolutely is a correlation between NEL and the lawsuit.
As many comments point out in this thread, legally the trial and the judicial decision had little to do with the NEL. Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case.
That's not in dispute.
> Therefore, in the counterfactual where the NEL had not been part of the dispute, the publishers would have still won their case
That fact that they brought the case does have a lot to do with NEL. Timeline-wise, it's clear NEL triggered the case. The HN crowd breeds a binary "yes/no" mentality, but real world businesses decisions, especially legal ones, take many things into account.