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Originally Posted by Barty
Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. They probably have escaped the wrath of the publishers so far because they are non profit.
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Sounds about right. If you look at the terms of use of the Internet Archive, of which OpenLibrary is part, you can see they are aware of some risk:
https://archive.org/about/terms.php
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Some of the content available through the Archive may be governed by local, national, and/or international laws and regulations, and your use of such content is solely at your own risk. . . . you certify that your use of any part of the Archive's Collections will be limited to noninfringing or fair use under copyright law.
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They are endorsed by a boatload of public and non-profit libraries, primarily in the US, Canada, and Australia:
https://openlibrary.org/libraries
The biggest libraries (Library of Congress, Harvard, New York Public, British Museum) are not on the list. Maybe their lawyers warned them away. Or maybe my last sentence is paranoid nonsense.
I recently read an OpenLibrary ePUB scan of this out-of-print title:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/080...RNPFKKJTTEBPV8
There were lots of scan errors. And the first few words of each chapter seemed to be missing. And you can't navigate from the table of contents to the rest of the book. And you can't easily follow footnotes. And the author's two newer books are not on OpenLibrary. It didn't bother me much, but probably would deter more serious readers, pushing them to the author's new title which perhaps has overlapping content:
http://www.amazon.com/Let-Me-Heal-Op..._bxgy_14_img_y
What happens if OpenLibrary gets a take-down notice? My wild guess is that it sometimes happens, and they take it down, and keep it down. As for lawsuits, the publicity would give OpenLibrary many more borrowers. Plus, the publisher could spend a lot of money and then lose its case. Since I think the people who work for publishers tend to be quite smart, I'm unsurprised they don't sue.
As to whether what OpenLibrary does is truly illegal, there's no case law. So, it's one of those moot questions.