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Originally Posted by Quoth
Proper libraries pay a licence fee per Intaneous loan and in some countries a per loan royalty for ebooks. The IA claimed they were also fighting for libraries. They weren't.
Copyright needs reformed but simply ignoring it and cheating living authors and the estates of recently dead ones isn't the way to do it. It was a deliberate attack on copyright.
They also have copyright violating works in their general downloads as well as the so called "Open Library".
Fair use doesn't include scanning entire books and loaning them. Google's case needs revisited, they won because they claimed they were not sharing the books but using them to aid search, also a stretch of fair use.
Exactly who funds IA and their mirror site in Eqypt?
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Internet Archive is funded by donations,grants etc. Fair use is a pretty vague, undefined concept. That's why this has to be settled by court cases. When home recording devices jumped on the scene it wasn't clear if it was legal to record TV or the radio either.
To me it's not really clear why you can lend out a physical book or DVD you don't own the copyright on vs. a scan limited to one copy loaned out at a time. Would it be OK if a robot plucks a book off a shelf and shoves it in front of a webcam and live streams it to a patron?