Let Readers Read | Internet Archive
Let Readers Read | Internet Archive
I love IA, but everything I've read about this case makes it sound like they are in the wrong here. The law is pretty clear on how lending books is supposed to work, they were fully aware of that because they used to follow the law, and then at some point they randomly decided to ignore the law.
I really hope they aren't choosing this hill to die on. It would be a huge loss for humanity if they collapsed.
It sounds like they were unnecessarily courting legal trouble with how they digitised and released records during the pandemic, but why are they wrong here?
Because their entire argument thus far has basically been “but we’re a library.” But that completely misses the point that even libraries need to comply with licensing laws. Even with ebooks, they can’t just lend an unlimited number of copies. They have licensing agreements with the publishers, to be able to lend [x] copies of [y] book at a time.
They purchase digital licenses to be able to lend those books, and they can only lend as many licenses as they own. Just like physical books. They need to use time-gated DRM to automatically revoke access whenever the rental time is up.
And at first, that’s exactly what IA did. But they decided to disable that DRM, and just start lending unlimited copies to people instead, which flies in the face of established copyright law.
Can you eli10 why their method violates the law? Seeing a one sided view from their pov does not reveal this.
I'm mostly just parroting what others have said, I'm not a lawyer. But my understanding is that online book lending is supposed to be limited to a discrete number of lendees at a time, just like the books at a physical library. IA knew this and yet decided to remove restrictions so that more people could borrow books than they were allowed to lend out at once.