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Comment by room4 | Hacker News Reader

> how dumb it was for them to think they could create new legal/copyright theory in the wake of the mass-hysteria of 2020.

I haven't followed the details of this case, but as a general notion, that sounds kinda reasonable to me?

Copyright law and enforcement is terribly broken in the USA, with a handful of giant publishers wielding massive, abusive power and the average American being harmed by losing their fair use rights and independent creators being bullied and abused by the giants behind the copyright cartel.

2020 upended society in many ways and created opportunities to fix various dysfunctional parts of society. It changed things as diverse as work-from-home norms to laws around takeaway alcohol from restaurants. The possibility to also improve copyright restrictions seems reasonable.

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"IA lifted its one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio, allowing its digital books to be checked out by up to 10,000 users at a time, without regard to the corresponding number of physical books in storage or in partner libraries’ possession―a practice IA acknowledges was a 'deviat[ion] from controlled digital lending.'"

No argument from me that copyright and fair use is broken (and exclusively in ways that inure to the benefit of enormous publishing houses), but the "National Emergency Library" thing was never going to fly, even if they had found a judge willing to stretch existing copyright law at the edges.

They were getting away with something because it seemed kind of reasonable. They were effectively letting one person effectively remotely view a physical book they owned.

But NEL threw all that out the window. And COVID was a pretty translucent fig leaf. It's not like there is any shortage of public domain works "for the children" out there even if copyright terms should be shorter.

Copyright law is broken in the US, but that doesn't mean that Internet Archive was going to legally get away with what they were doing and escape legal trouble, even if it arguably wasn't morally wrong.

Not sure I follow. I can't think of any country where the CDL would've been clearly legal as is, to say nothing about its "emergency" version.

What are you referencing as not following? I'm not in discordance that CDL was likely illegal, simply in how they were making and sharing unauthorized electronic reproductions. At that point, it doesn't even matter how many people they allowed to borrow at one time. My comment on morality was in reference to how some people may argue that the internet archive was not in the moral wrong, but the law isn't based on any one moral code, so this doesn't really matter to the legal question.

Ah sorry, I was referring to the comment about US copyright laws. I assumed you were implying that the US system was uniquely bad/broken/worse but on re reading it, that's just me badly interpreting what you said. Sorry about that!

"appeal to morality" is how Internet Archive, Wikipedia, Mozilla, and Google etc. have lost their way in the first place.

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