> Publishers didn’t like it CDL, but they lived with it.

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.