The Internet Archive has lost its appeal in Hachette vs. Internet Archive

There's a better chance of you winning every lottery on Earth twice in a row than copyright terms being shortened in this century.

Basically, there is an established practice for lending printed books: the library buys a book and lends it to patrons without permission from the copyright owner.

However, publishers believe that digital books are different from physical books and established practice doesn't apply to them; they believe that lending should be made at publishers' terms, to be specific:

- only "academic libraries" (chosen by publishers) may lend digital books

- they may lend them only to the members, for example, only students of the university, not to random people

- library must buy a special "library license", which might have arbitrary price and arbitrary terms

- the license has a limited term: sometimes it is 1-2 years, sometimes it is 26 lendings, after which the library must purchase a new license

- the library must use publishers-approved DRM which might not work on some devices

To enforce these rules publishers use DRM that prevents anyone from buying a digital book and lending it to other person (which was possible with digital books). So, in publishers view new technology means new rules and new opportunities.

The IA found a workaround: they bought physical books, scanned them and lent those digital copies instead of a physical book, provided that only one user can read the same book at the same time. They acted like a library but using remote access to a digital copy. The lender might read the book on IA's website enforcing the terms of use or download a DRM-protected PDF.

The lawsuit is about whether IA actions are legal or not (i.e. if digital books may be lent like physical books). Given that in future there will be less and less physical books, if publishers win, it will mean that libraries will not be able to lend contemporary books at the same terms and costs they lent physical books.

There are several complications: dubious partnerships by IA with libraries to increase the number of lent simultaneously copies; dubious decision to remove limits during COVID pandemic. However, there are facts that play in IA favour: there are precedents when making digital copies was considered legal (by Google Books), and there are a 17 US Code 108 [2] and 109 [3], which allows some exemptions from copyright for libraries and archives.

[1] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23723923-hachette-v-...

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/108

[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/109

2) Digital books are DRM-protected so you cannot lend them or re-sell like you can with physical books. So making a digital copy of a physical book can be considered merely a method to workaround these restrictions.

3) Publishers want to use new technology (electronic books) to remove rights that consumers had with physical books, to be specific: a right to re-sell the book, a right to lend the book, a right to make archival copies etc.

https://help.archive.org/help/borrowing-from-the-lending-lib...

IMHO, people who could afford the book are unlikely to have the patience to work through this process. Indeed, downloading from a pirate site would offer a lot more flexibility for the reader.

That's a more interesting argument. I think it's valid, abstractly at least.

> Copyright strikes a balance of rights between content creators/owners and content consumers

Originally sought to, perhaps. However copyright has devolved into almost entirely serving the interests of the transferred owner who are overwhelmingly huge publishers.

It makes sense to me that a digital library poses an existential threat to the business model of those large publishers who have gradually moved away from obtaining or encouraging the creation of new original works (the original intention of copyright) to reselling and repackaging existing content over and over again. This is why things like DRM exist, not to prevent piracy, but one one many mechanisms serving this strategy by controlling how ordinary consumers can consume what they "bought", when, where, on what, for how long... so many types of restrictions all serving to extract the maximum economic return for each original piece of work they own - A library completely undermines that strategy, because it necessarily removes most of those mechanisms to function.