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Originally Posted by salamanderjuice
Considering ripping a CD or recording TV with a VCR is also making copy without the permission of the rights holder yet are both considered fine today after court cases I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be.
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Commenting just on a part of this, in the real world, books, including eBooks, do not behave the same as music or film, but the legal rules are, AFAIK, mostly the same.
A CD copy is an exact copy. Any books I have read from Internet Archive are far from that. Footnotes and indexes and tables of contents are hopeless.
The first book I remember reading from IA was Robert Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. There were so many missing and out of order pages that I eventually switched to reading a paper copy. But if there had been a missing page in the paper copy, as several here have pointed out, I probably could have, with difficulty, found it in that bad IA copy.
The judge wrote that:
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What fair use does not allow, however, is the mass reproduction and
distribution of complete copyrighted works in a way that does not
transform those works and that creates directly competing substitutes for the originals.
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As noted above, in my experience, the books
were usually transformed. It sounds crazy to think that IA would, on appeal, argue that their library is almost all bad copies transformed by thousands of misscans, but they are.
The judge did ask, as I read it, for the parties to try to negotiate a settlement. I guess he is hoping for IA to give up lending in return for not having to pay anything to the publishers. To me, the ideal compromise would be to allow IA continue as is with clearer restrictions on how recent the book can be and on forgoing use of artificial intelligence to improve the scans.