[Alanon]

I'm not sure that most digital libraries actually honour the "one copy" rule, except, until recently, Open Library? At least, none of the digital services I used seemed to. Is there some regulation that makes this a separate legal issue? Are real libraries expected to scour craigslist in search of out-of-print editions, when multiple digital copies are clearly easier to manage, cheaper to produce and maintain, and better suited for their mission and purpose? Or is IA simply not considered a "proper" library, and therefore needs to follow different rules? Would it help if they registered under a different jurisdiction? (On a side note, wasn't Open Library a separate project until comparatively recently, when they merged their accounts with IA?)

Another thing I'm not clear on - what exactly constitutes copyright-infringing distribution? In this instance, the books are either available for perusal online only or in an encrypted form, always for a limited time. The borrower can't be said to ever actually own a private copy of the book - he can't sell it, he can't give it away, he can't send it to anyone else but himself - he merely uses it for a while.

I understand the analogy with stealing TV signals, but I don't think the similarities are strong enough. TV is by nature ephemeral, always in production, and consistent views are in direct proportion with making money, and that's tied in with continuing certain programmes - you're not replaying the news ten times. (Even there an argument could be made that since advertising persists in stolen TV signals, it ultimately brings profits to the channels even in cases of piracy, due to an increase in total number of eyes on the screen). I'd say the current issue is more akin to re-transmitting 10-year-old programming for free rather than a direct theft of today's news in an attempt to make money off it?

I can also think of some examples of untouchable services - YouTube has videos of millions, if not billions of songs that are completely free to stream an infinite number of times - many of them have no ads and produce no discernible income for any party. Certainly, if you contravene YouTube's mechanics and extract the crappy mp3 file from that incredibly ugly, Comic Sans infested lyrics vid, you are doing so illegally. But are we to understand that YouTube is "distributing" user-uploaded music videos in a piratic way? If what IA is doing is so problematic, what YouTube is doing is infinitely more so? What if someone uploaded a free video of them reading someone else's book aloud? What would be the status of that?

A couple of situations vis-a-vis copyright where I can imagine a clear need for agreements to be reached between IA and the publishers are: 1. In cases when a book is still in print and producing revenue, IA's offering it even in a reduced volume, could, theoretically, prevent people from buying said book, and 2. When the author/publisher intends to publish a new edition after a hiatus, similar circumstances would apply. The problem is, people who would "preview" books in such a way already have means at their disposal - they have physical libraries, book clubs, dollar stores and the like. It's not illegal to borrow a book from a friend, read it, and return it to him, thus getting the product of someone's labour for free.

Outside these caveats, I can't see how the publishers/authors are damaged here? If a copy of a book was legally purchased by a library or private person in, say, 1990, the publishers shouldn't have expectations of royalties, profits or claim lost revenue from an edition that's been out-of-print? Whether that copy was given to thousands of people thirty, twenty, or even five years after they stopped manufacturing it, shouldn't make a difference, should it? After all, a book goes out of print when a publisher decides it's no longer worth their effort to print, market and sell it. Even if thousands of people went and bought an out-of-print edition from second-hand book-stores, it wouldn't make a lick of difference for the author or the publisher, they wouldn't even know about it.

Even if none of these nuances mattered, isn't there a case to be made for the different types of usage here? It takes resources to scan and host these books, resources that IA does not make a profit from, that all clearly serve an educational purpose and are in the public interest, globally? Given that it's managed and distributed on a temporary basis, in a non-commercial setting, I see a clear value here that the publishers aren't willing to provide. Their profit margins aren't exactly going to tank because someone in Pakistan was able to read a book from 20 years ago, particularly given that they most likely don't even cater or export to that market.