Oh, for crying out loud, Internet Archive. This is not the fight you should be fighting.

The Internet Archive is the steward of an incredibly valuable repository of archived information. Much of what it’s got squirrelled away is likely unique, irreplaceable historical records of things that have otherwise been lost. And they’re risking all of that in this quixotic battle to share books that are widely available anyway and not at all at risk.

“Lending” out those books in the way that they did was blatant copyright violation spitting directly into the eye of publishers known to be litigious and vindictive. All to fight for a point that’s not part of their mandate, archiving the Internet. They’re going to lose and it’s going to hurt them badly.

Each copy can only be loaned to one person at a time, to mimic the lending attributes of physical books.

Internet Archive believes that its approach falls under fair use but publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley, and Penguin Random House disagree. They filed a lawsuit in 2020 equating IA’s controlled digital lending operation to copyright infringement.

That is not what the lawsuit was about, Internet Archive. If you’re going to fight this fight then be honest about what exactly you’re fighting for. The lawsuit in 2020 was not about one-person-at-a-time lending, it was about your “COVID Emergency Library” where you removed all restrictions and let people download books freely.

I strongly believe that copyright has gone berserk of the decades and grown like an uncontrolled weed, harming the intellectual commons for the sake of megacorporations’ profits. I’m a subscriber on this piracy community, after all. I believe in the position that Internet Archive is fighting for here, despite all the downvotes I’m surely about to be hammered with. But they shouldn’t be the ones fighting it. Let someone else take this one on. Sci-Hub or Library Genesis, maybe.