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Originally Posted by pendragginp
I'll take your word for it that Open Library may have some books that are there without the author's permission, but I can't see that anybody else is making any profit from the books bein borrowed, read, and returned. What am I missing?
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Are you asking legally, or morally?
Legally, in most countries, there isn't an exception to book copyrights based on profit.
In the US, there isn't an absolute exception either. But, compared to other countries, the US balances an extremely long copyright period with a fair use doctrine that conceivably gives OpenLibrary a legal out:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview.../four-factors/
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When you review fair use cases, you may find that they sometimes contradict one another or conflict with the rules expressed in this chapter. Fair use involves subjective judgments and are often affected by factors such as a judge or jury’s personal sense of right or wrong.
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Until someone with enough money to follow through with appeals sues archive.org, Americans don't know the legal status here. People in other countries may know better what the situation is in their case.
Morally, here's what I think:
I've read a few of the EPUB's, and they are of quite low quality. Not only are they filled with scan errors -- way, way more than anything from Amazon or Overdrive I've ever read -- about half the time there is significant missing material. It seems to me that extremely few people who would have purchased the EPUB or paper book will put up with this. The effect on the copyright holder is thus so minimal that the public interest in dissemination of literature outweighs the economic harm. Some defenders of out-and-out piracy make similar arguments. But I think it is far more likely for a perfect pirated EPUB to replace a commercial sale than it is for a junky OpenLibrary scan, borrowed for two weeks, and probably after a wait, to do the same. Advantage: OpenLibrary.
However, the PDF situation may be different. In 2006, when OpenLibrary started, their PDF's were extremely inconvenient to read, since you probably had to do it on a PC. But, nowadays, I suspect that color tablet owners can have a pretty good reading experience with a copyrighted OpenLibrary PDF. If so, and I was on the archive.org board, I might vote to withdraw the PDF's while keeping the EPUB's.