That's why archive.org should have never been sued for lending books they had physical copy of. This is the result. Publishers should be more careful what they wish for.
But during covid archive.org decided to just remove the limit and lend unlimited copies concurrently which started the debacle with the publishers.
IIRC, this was 100% it. Lending one digital version of one physical asset was likely already a violation copyright. Lending UNLIMITED digital versions of one physical copy was DEFINITELY a blatant violation of copyright.
"IA maintains that it delivers each Work “only to one already entitled to view [it]”―i.e., the one person who would be entitled to check out the physical copy of each Work. But this characterization confuses IA’s practices with traditional library lending of print books. IA does not perform the traditional functions of a library; it prepares derivatives of Publishers’ Works and delivers those derivatives to its users in full. That Section 108 allows libraries to make a small number of copies for preservation and replacement purposes does not mean that IA can prepare and distribute derivative works en masse and assert that it is simply performing the traditional functions of a library. 17 U.S.C. § 108; see also, e.g., ReDigi, 910 F.3d at 658 (“We are not free to disregard the terms of the statute merely because the entity performing an unauthorized reproduction makes efforts to nullify its consequences by the counterbalancing destruction of the preexisting phonorecords.”)."
This wasn't a very smart move of them. I get why they did it but they put themselves at a huge legal risk.
Publishers had accepted the prior arrangement before The Archive decided to push it, if not explicitly then implicitly by not suing.
I'm a believer in The Archive's mission, and I wish they had treated the goodwill they'd accumulated as something worth preserving and not a currency to be spent.
It has been stated by many before me: lending books should have been handled by a separate entity, especially when they removed the physical backing requirement.
Furthermore, in the discovery for the Internet Archive case, publishers had already found a case where IA had lent out books despite knowing their partner libraries wasn't actually withdrawing loaned-out copies from circulation. The CDL premise was always just a suggestion, and IA would have still lost their case if they hadn't done the National Emergency Library (NEL) stunt or if they'd been sued in another venue that hadn't had the ReDigi case as precedent.
It's important to note that whenever a company decides to sue for copyright, it is often late, because the company is banking infringements up to the 3-year statute of limitations and because building a meritorious case takes time. The lack of a timely lawsuit proves almost nothing about the intent of a publisher with a valid case against you.
The thing is, I don't even think the whole stunt damaged much of the IA's goodwill? I know of a few people who withheld donations to IA, but that was mainly under the assumption that publishers would be getting a billion-dollar damage award that would immediately bankrupt IA and result in it's archives being sold off to Lexis-Nexis or something. The funny thing is, IA wound up settling for a sum so small they had to promise never to reveal it, and the danger is gone, so the only thing people complain about now is just that the NEL stunt maybe pushed them "above the radar" or something.
It's still insane that shredding books for AI training is legal, but this isn't.
AI training happens to be one of the fields exercising that option, but since it's the current favorite topic for people to hate on, here we are.
The reason why AI companies don't do this is that they're cheap and desperate for training tokens. Same reason why they have scrapers that will happily overload web interfaces for Git repos following links to everything, even though you can just Git clone the repo with far less stress on the host. The AI people are ultimately there just to pillage as much knowledge as they can as fast as possible. Their scraping practices are slap-dash garbage.
[0] https://ones-and-zeroes.ghost.io/scanning-all-the-books-the-...
Your comment seems to also be regurgitating common misconceptions (to put it charitably) about AI and web scraping.
For AI training specifically, the only standing caselaw is the Anthropic lawsuit. And in that lawsuit, the only thing that was actually in the wrong was maintaining a library of pirated books. That was deemed illegal and Anthropic was ordered to delete those files. But, notably, the judge explicitly said that scanning books to train AI on them was legal, and imposed no requirement to destroy scanned books. I'm pretty sure Anthropic wouldn't even need to retain the physical copies - though there's no caselaw on that in particular, so don't cite me.
Publishers will always state a maximalist position but the truth of what they accept is what they tolerate without suing.
How are these things remotely related? If anything, Archive.org’s callous, thoughtless approach nuked the hands of legitimate archival efforts.