this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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By "controlled lending system," do you mean the library? If so, it is ridiculously expensive for them to offer ebooks and audiobooks. One ebook costs $60-100 and they can only lend the licensed copy for two years. You would think audiobooks would be more expensive to do but publishers charge roughly the same.
What Internet Archive did is digitized physical books, then loaned out their "one copy" with DRM. Their assertion is that this constitutes fair use. I don't really think there's any merit to that argument based on the law and the body of precedent, and fundamentally tend to dislike legislation from the bench (judges just arbitrarily reinterpreting laws). Passing new laws and restructuring how IP law works is the job of the legislature, not the judiciary.
IA then made this worse by taking the already super tenuous "fair use" argument and throwing it out the window by removing the lending limits during Covid. It was waving a red flag in front of IP holders and begging them to take aggressive action.
I think if they hadn't abandoned the CDL modern during the pandemic, they could have kept it going indefinitely. Even if it wasn't likely fair use, it might have been. More than that, it would have been bad press for the publisher to make the first move.
Abandoning CDL during the pandemic was just waving a red flag and giving the publishers a slam dunk case.
I think if IA had just held the line with CDL, they could have over time just effectively established a precedent. Lost opportunity.