It's good to want things. The contours of the Google case are discussed in this decision: Google Books scanning is "fair use" because books aren't made available in their entirety, and the IA's library feature is (unless SCOTUS disagrees, which seems extraordinarily unlikely) emphatically not.
It was never anybody's claim that scanning a copyrighted work is always illegal. This is an easy, straightforward decision to read; I think you'd be better off just reading it.
The decision is that lending of digital books causes "market harm for the publishers". It outweighs anything else. So the court only cares about profits of publishers and not right of the buyers, including "first-sale doctrine" and right to lend a legally obtained book. The court sees the case as merely making illegal copies and doesn't want to make analogies with libraries lending out books. It is obvious.
You can apply most of those arguments to a library lending out (distributing) physical books without authorization and causing same harm to the publisher.
No, that is not at all what the decision says. There's a 4-factor test for "fair use". Market harm is just one of them. The court found IA failed all 4 tests. That's the ballgame: if your copying is (1) unauthorized and (2) not fair use, it's infringing. There's no "library exception".
The copying only exists on a technical level because digital stuff is weird. Only one copy is usable at a time.
So either IA is guilty of copying because of a technicality, or normal libraries are only allowed because of a technicality/exception. (Because normal libraries fail the transformation test, they fail the amount copied test, they fail the expressive nature test, and they fail the market impact test.)
I want to believe the former is correct. Either way I believe there should be a way for IA to access that same "this isn't considered copying" territory somehow.
I'm talking about what libraries are allowed to do, the non-digital version of lending. It fails every fair use test, but they're allowed to do it.
The only difference is whether technically copying happens, because controlled digital lending has the same results as a system that involves no copying. It doesn't have the common definition of copying where two people can access two copies at the same time.
If IA came first, and libraries came second, would we refer to libraries as having a technicality/exception that lets them be legal?
Though I suspect that if libraries were invented right now they'd be declared illegal.
They don't have to pass the test, but they still fail it.
Please look at what I'm actually saying instead of snapping off replies that don't address my point. (And yes I edited in another couple sentences but the part about libraries not copying was in the original version of both those posts.)
They can't "fail" it; the test simply doesn't apply to them. "Fair uses" governs the legitimate creation of unauthorized derived works. Lending a physical book does not create a derived work.
(You're fine editing; I edited too, just for clarity).
You can still apply the elements of the test to them, and they fail every element.
Let me try making my post a list of bullet points.
* Libraries are allowed because technically it's not copying, and otherwise would be very illegal. Agree or disagree?
* Controlled digital lending is only copying on a technical level, not in the traditional sense where more than one copy can be accessed simultaneously. Agree or disagree?
* If CDL could somehow remove that technicality and do pure digital transfers, it would be fine. Agree or disagree?
* A better version of copyright would ignore that technicality. Agree or disagree?
Copying has a specific definition under the law. Physical lending of books does not come close to meeting it. Applying any of the fair use tests to physical book lending thus does not make any sense. It's like applying the Central Hudson Test to my cooking of a grilled cheese sandwich: it's lawful, the government has minimal interest in regulating it, none of that matters because my sandwich isn't expressive.
If your whole point is that we could tear down all of copyright law and replace it with a system that allowed IA CDL, then, sure. We could do a lot of things. I'm not really here for that argument (because there just isn't enough to nerd out about in it, not because I have any problem with the exercise).
But as for the law as has existed in the United States for the last 50-odd years, I'm reminded of the words of a young Baltimore entrepreneur, who infamously said "you want it to be one way --- but it's the other way".
> If your whole point is that we could tear down all of copyright law and replace it
No, no, not at all.
In this situation I just want to change the definition of "copy" slightly.
(And to point out that slightly different definitions of terms would make libraries illegal. There's nothing special about the current definitions. In particular they're not the most straightforward definitions at all. Again, none of this is about radical change, just looking at where small tweaks would get us.)
There is no reasonable definition of "copy" that would make the lending of a physical book a copy. The word "copy" literally exists to differentiate other actions from that action.
> There is no reasonable definition of "copy" that would make the lending of a physical book a copy.
But it could count as distribution. Copyright covers that. Library style distribution could be just as illegal as CDL style copying, by barely changing anything.
The point is that yes, digital items get treated differently by the law because using them requires "technical" copying. Moving them requires copying, using them requires copying, lending them requires copying. The law as written means that digital works will give their buyer far fewer rights than identical physical copies of the same. And yes, that's precisely why the current law is bananas, because it turns digitization into an excuse to enclose the commons. But I have no confidence in the courts to stop it, because that's not what courts do.
Except when it is. Laws are not computer code and it's precisely the court's job to interpret how they apply. This can include overturning previous interpretations. For examples see the recent ruckus about supreme court decisions changing what people interpreted as fundamental and accepted rights.
It is however not much a stretch to say that someone reading a book and committing it to memory is making a copy not inherently different from the "copies" being made when viewing something over the Internet. Now if you go and lend/sell a book after reading it you still retain the copy in your mind. Yet somehow that is legally fine.
