this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Basically what you're saying is big corporations found an opportunity and took it.
But the lawsuit was about CDL as a whole, not what happened in 2020.
Also, why you're trusting Wikipedia over the EFF is beyond me.
Yes, the lawsuit is about CDL as a whole. They could have sued IA years earlier. They could be suing libraries all over the place for using CDL. But they didn't, because the people using CDL were doing so in order to placate the publishers. It was an unspoken truce.
You can see a similar dynamic going on with fanfiction. A site like fanfiction.net is a gigantic pile of copyright violations, and yet you don't see it beset with lawsuits. That's because fanfiction.net isn't doing anything that would harm the income of the copyright holders or otherwise "poke the bear." You occasionally hear about fan projects getting shut down when they go "too far", however. Like what IA did in the case of the National Emergency Library.
Wikipedia has neutral point of view and verifiability policies. Everything written in their articles should be backed by external sources and if there are multiple sides to a story they should all be fairly represented. The EFF, on the other hand, is taking the IA's side in this and is motivated to make them sound better and the publishers to sound worse.
The Wikipedia article has 32 external sources cited for its contents. The EFF article has only two internal links, one of them leading to their lawyers' homepage and one linking to the motion that the EFF filed.
They sued the Internet Archive for doing the exact same thing libraries do, and only with books that are not in print. Much like why you trust Wikipedia over the EFF, why you think that's something worth defending I don't know.
Libraries do not make unlimited copies of books so everyone can check it out at the same time without wait. Obviously the EFF doesn't want to admit its client did that because it destroys their case, but that's what the judge found the IA stupidly did.
Libraries use CDL all the time.
Libraries buy licenses to do so from the publishers, but that's unrelated to what I said.
I'm saying the judge found that IA violated its own CDL, so even if its interpretation of the law was correct, the IA would still be liable.