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this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2024
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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.
Literally every digital "loan" is multiple separate, unrecoverable copies. That law is not about digital lending and cannot be applied to digital lending.
All digital lending of copyrighted material without an explicit license to do so is copyright infringement, and it was always a guarantee that the ruling would happen.
The removal of the "single copy" lie isn't relevant to the legal status. It's relevant because it forced the hands of the publishers to take action. There was never any possibility of any ruling but the obvious blanket "you can't do that" that the law dictates, once IA forced them to take it to court.
It is literally impossible to send a file over the internet with no more than one copy. Every additional "loan" is multiple additional copies. Even if we ignore that, you're very conveniently ignoring the "material objects" part of that definition, which again, completely and unconditionally disqualifies a loan over the internet.
DRM is entirely irrelevant. It has no bearing on anything.
They filed a lawsuit because IA flagrantly and egregiously violated their rights. They openly fucking dared them to. And now they don't get ignored on their limited copy illegal lending and can't get away with any copies.
DRM is relevant to the legal redistribution because that is part of the terms of their license agreement and for no other reason. Their entire lending practice of digital copies is legal because, and only because, they have contracts that specifically determine how they may do so.
It does not in any way alter the nature of blatant illegal copies. It does not make every loan not multiple distinct illegal copies.
I'm actively opposing people telling insane, completely unhinged lies that aren't even loosely connected to reality to validate a position that every single person with a shred of common sense knew was going to get laughed out of court the day they did it and did get laughed out of court. If you tried this case a million times, Internet Archive wouldn't have a chance in any of them.
Petition for changes to the law. Don't lie and pretend the law says what you want it to.
Your arguments read like you believe a DRM-protected ebook file is a verbatim copy that can be freely distributed and used. I just want to clarify that it is not, not even on a technical level. The form of DRM that libraries use is not just a license you agree to. It is an ecryption that turns that ebook into a garbled mess for anyone but the person who borrowed the ebook, during a set timeframe. After that period expires it cannot be decrypted anymore and stays a garbled mess forever, irrevocably ceasing to be a copy.