• conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    Any digitized lending was always illegal.

    The law was abundantly clear. You cannot distribute wholesale copies of someone else’s work. Publishers didn’t bother because the scale was small and they didn’t want to take the PR hit for a scale that didn’t matter.

    The first sale doctrine, necessarily, can only possibly apply to a physical object. There is no such thing as a “single copy” of a digital object. Every time that “single copy” moves is a new copy. There is no legal framework in the US that even acknowledges the premise of a digital copy. It’s always a license.

    You need new laws to apply to the digital world. There is absolutely zero room for ambiguity that what the Internet archive did never in any way was protected. This ruling was a literal guarantee the minute the Internet Archive removed their (unambiguously not in any way legal) pretense of a “single copy”. There isn’t a court in the country that would even consider ruling any other way, because the law is well beyond clear. This ruling happened because the Internet Archive forced it to happen. If they had left open mass scale piracy to pirate sites they would have been fine.

    If their lawyers advised them that there was even a possibility that this argument could work, they should be disbarred. They would be better off spending their money on lobbying for better laws than pursuing a case less likely than winning the power ball jackpot 5 draws in a row.

    • ArchRecord@lemm.ee
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      4 months ago

      Any digitized lending was always illegal.

      the law is well beyond clear.

      I think Title 17, Chapter 108 of the U.S. Code would beg to differ. Digitized lending was always allowed, especially for libraries and archives. The only ambiguous part was the number of copies allowed to be digitized of any individual work, (many of the books the Internet Archive digitized only had one copy digitized and lent at any given time) so most of what the Internet Archive engaged in was fully legal under this code, and only a fraction of the 500 million titles that are now illegal to lend would have been affected, even though all 500 million can now not be legally lent due to this ruling.

      You need new laws to apply to the digital world.

      True, we can agree on that. We need new laws. Until that point, no change will happen if the boundaries are not pushed.

      I guarantee you there hasn’t been anywhere near the current level of momentum for the rights of libraries to lend digitized books any time prior to this court case. If the Internet Archive hadn’t done it in the first place, we would be in the same situation we’re in after this ruling.

      Them doing so pushes the issue forward.

      This ruling was a literal guarantee the minute the Internet Archive removed their (unambiguously not in any way legal) pretense of a “single copy”

      As I’ll say again, this was not the premise under which the publishers won this case. They won the case under the premise that any digitized lending was not transformative, and thus not “fair use,” even though it’s legal under other statutes. The number of copies held no bearing on the ruling.