Libraries buy either physical books, or licenses to ebooks, and can only lend out as many of them as they own at a time. IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They then disabled that lending limitation.
There’s really nobody who would argue that taking a CD, ripping it to MP3s, and providing those for unlimited download is anything except piracy, and the people suing IA are claiming same goes for books. And it is rather hard to find compelling legal a reason why it isn’t.
Loads of people don’t consider copying something and giving it to someone else as piracy. Only I’m very recent time has this been met with violence from well funded organizations.
IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They did that for years, and while likely technically a violation copyright the copyright holders never came after them. Then during the pandemic they stopped the artificial limit and just gave unlimited free copies of scanned books to anybody. Publishers, expectedly, had a meltdown and are now out for blood.
Libraries buy either physical books, or licenses to ebooks, and can only lend out as many of them as they own at a time. IA skirted the line by lending out self-digitized versions based on how many physical books they had, which was a grey area, but technically maybe not illegal.
They then disabled that lending limitation.
There’s really nobody who would argue that taking a CD, ripping it to MP3s, and providing those for unlimited download is anything except piracy, and the people suing IA are claiming same goes for books. And it is rather hard to find compelling legal a reason why it isn’t.
Loads of people don’t consider copying something and giving it to someone else as piracy. Only I’m very recent time has this been met with violence from well funded organizations.
They did that for years, and while likely technically a violation copyright the copyright holders never came after them. Then during the pandemic they stopped the artificial limit and just gave unlimited free copies of scanned books to anybody. Publishers, expectedly, had a meltdown and are now out for blood.