Quote:
Originally Posted by murraypaul
The publishers?
They have a slam-dunk legal case.
Whatever your thoughts about the morality of what IA are doing, it is very obviously illegal.
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Legality or illegality doesn't matter. This is a civil case not a criminal case. In copyright infringement cases in the USA, there are three categories of damages,
Actual damages for which the publishers are going to have to supply the dollar amount of their losses due to the copyright infringement.
Infringer's profits where the publishers are going to have to establish the amounts of IA's profits due the the infringement and prove they exceed the amount of actual damages.
And now we have the joker.
Statutory damages which can go as low as $200 for cases where the copyright infringement has been held to be innocent to $30.000. At the discretion of the court where the judge holds the damages to willful, the damages may be increased to $150,000. OTOH, the same section states "
The court shall remit statutory damages in any case where an infringer believed and had reasonable grounds for believing that his or her use of the copyrighted work was a fair use under section 107, if the infringer was: (i) an employee or agent of a nonprofit educational institution, library, or archives acting within the scope of his or her employment who, or such institution, library, or archives itself, which infringed by reproducing the work in copies".
And that, folks, is something the courts are going to have to decide.