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Yes, it is. But back to the point I made originally: this case had an infinitesimal chance of success. You can come up with a worse fact pattern for fair use, but you have to work at it. Whole copies of books, the form of copyrighted work most legible to the law, that are currently for sale in ebook form by their publishers? That was simply never going to be determined to be "fair use".

IA isn't going to shut down over this, I don't think. I don't think they'll pay any damages at all, since there's a statute that suggests damages be remitted for nonprofits.

Again: the real damage is a 2nd Cir. precedent that 1:1 CDL fails the fair use test. That's going to hurt other people. This happens often enough that there's a saying about it: "bad facts make bad law."

> Whole copies of books, the form of copyrighted work most legible to the law, that are currently for sale in ebook form by their publishers

For some reason this was acceptable in physical form for hundreds of years. CDL is just making it more convenient for our modern reality.

No it's not.

Libraries don't make copies. They lend you the actual books.

Copyright is literally right to copy. Scanning the book and doing something with, such as lending it forward, is copying.

(The covid thing strengthens the case of the book guys - the CDL suddenly let anyone get anything because Archive decided to change the rules unilaterally)

The problem is that the act of sharing something digitally is implicitly assumed to be making a copy wheres lending someone a book you have already read and internalized is not. Copyright laws should have been adjusted to preserve the same freedoms for digital use as you had before rather than being even more of a bad deal for society.
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I’m sure you’re aware that in our digital world, there is no difference between “transmitting the book” and “copying the book”. Yes, you can argue the law needs to change first but that’s not how changes happen. Laws are bent by society, not the other way around.
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Except that's the whole point of the CDL compromise, that only one person can borrow the book at a time.
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