This response by the Internet Archive focuses on easily refutable claims, such as that they acquired their books illegally, while sidestepping the one substantive issue: that they had no legal right to replace the controlled digital lending process that they had been following with uncontrolled lending. This is what so many authors and publishers are objecting to; and they are right to point out that this resembles simple piracy.
Ideally they'd extend the limits of simultaneously lended copies by how many were there in libraries that are now closed, acting as a proxy to the physical copies that are now locked down. But this would take a long time to implement, they'd have to set up a system that gives each library the opportunity to submit their inventory and allow IA to act on the library behalf by lending their books.
I was curious about your mention of authors and publishers complaining, since I hadn't seen any objections yet.
This led me to complaints by The Authors Guild[1] (as detailed in an article by The Guardian[2]) and three other authors mentioned in an NPR article[3]. Since then I've also discovered a statement by the Association of American Publishers[4] linked from the HN submission.
Some of the focus is on the revenue that authors make from their publications and some of it is on the legality of making the content more accessible.
It is worth reading the original HN submission link, as it contains some useful clarifications around the way the National Emergency Library operates; including, for example, that access to content is on a 2-week loan basis and requires the content to be checked-out from the library
The Internet Archive have also updated their National Emergency Library FAQ[5] in response to the debate.
It'd be good to discover whether the National Emergency Library ends up increasing awareness and access to publications temporarily, and whether they will collect and distribute any funds after-the-fact based on readership.
> Opponents of CDL argue that CDL is not like lending, which does not require copying, and dispute the claim that only one copy at a time is available for reading. Opponents say that CDL involves first making an unauthorized digital copy of a printed edition of a work, and then making an additional unauthorized digital copy for each "borrower". Opponents also argue that unencrypted digital copies are distributed for viewing in a Web browser, and that these copies can be retained, viewed, or printed from the browser cache even after the e-book is marked as "returned" and is available for "lending" to other readers.
This is based on the vague notion of "creative work" in copyright.
Before the digital age, there was only a close 1:1 relationship between the ephemeral/conceptual creative work and physical copies of that work. Authors - and more specifically publishers - held exclusive control over the latter since the act of copying and distribution was prohibitively expensive.
The game changer in digital technology is that it democratized creating and distributing copies. Not just that, digital technology has blurred the definition of a "physical carrier" as a creative work can be represented as set of constituent bitstreams on a disk but also as pixels or audio on a screen/speakers. The creative work itself is re-generated/re-constructed through digital devices each time it is consumed.
Copyright still applies, the ephemeral conceptual work as was original intended by the author is still protected. But it's become very difficult to apply that protection to equally ephemeral representations in the digital realm.
The hard problem then is that copyright doesn't make a distinction between "physical copy", "digital copy" and the ephemeral "creative work" as an abstract idea or concept which was originally conceived by the author.
This leaves an huge void for interpretations. And so, both the Internet Archive as well as the Authors Guild can make sound legal arguments.
You'll find the "copyright is broken" cry on both sides of the aisle. But I don't think that rings entirely true either. There are enough provisions for publishers and authors to authorize or take down published copies online. The Internet Archive in particular even openly allows for that through their digital front office. The bigger question remains how the digital era shapes publishing and lending business models.
The sense in which it is uncontrolled is that there is no queue. People can borrow the "same book" simultaneously, where this would normally be limited to the number of copies the library owns.
