> I don't know what they were thinking. I'd love to hear how they arrived at the decision to just brazenly flout copyright law like this.

In a previous HN discussion [0], @Apocryphon linked to [1] speculation on a possible explanation: that the IA leadership is perhaps hoping for a landmark court ruling [2] that challenges the first-sale doctrine as it applies to ebooks.

Physical books can be lent out freely by libraries but digital goods like ebooks cannot because they are exempted from the first sale doctrine [3]. This forces libraries to enter into separate licensing agreements with rights holders, which is why the IA is purportedly trying to challenge the rent extraction from libraries, albeit in a less than ideal way.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22731472

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22734145

[2] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1244257620548038656.html?...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine#Applicatio...

They did it because the pandemic has closed libraries coast to coast, and it was a nice thing to do for people. Imagine that, making a decision not based on money or liability.

I know, fuck them, right? /s

> They did it because the pandemic has closed libraries coast to coast, and it was a nice thing to do for people. Imagine that, making a decision not based on money or liability.

You mean a stupid one that endangers everything else you do, yes?

Robbing a bank and giving away the money is a decision not based on money or liability, but you shouldn't be very surprised you still get put in prison for it.

> Robbing a bank and giving away the money is a decision not based on money or liability, but you shouldn't be very surprised you still get put in prison for it.

You've picked the one circumstance-- an unprecedented worldwide pandemic that is wreaking economic mayhem-- that could possibly weaken one of the indefatigable "pre-digital analogies for understanding digital ethics."

I would not be surprised if the police were unable to locate a culprit who had been handing out monthly $1200 cash bundles from bank robberies. (Especially if they delivered the bundles on a dependeable schedule.) :)

Edit: clarification

> You've picked the one circumstance-- an unprecedented worldwide pandemic that is wreaking economic mayhem-- that could possibly weaken one of the indefatigable "pre-digital analogies for understanding digital ethics."

No, not really. The police would very much track down such a culprit and they would go to prison.

To say nothing of the fact that there are about 20,000 books at Project Gutenberg and countless other (legal) short stories, books, articles, etc. around the web. (And that's before talking video and other multimedia.)

It's not like there is some critical shortage of things to read online in the absence of the IA.

What about modern textbooks and academic pieces that students need access to? And, in particular, students from lesser privileged socioeconomic backgrounds in the US public education system?

You're both so right. The only thing that matters is money.

I am an author and I making my living from book sales. You're right, I'm absolutely obsessed with money, in the sense that I need money to buy food and pay my electricity bill.

> Robbing a bank and giving away the money is a decision not based on money or liability, but you shouldn't be very surprised you still get put in prison for it.

Quoting the other comment here to make my point.

AFAIK IA they did not give away the books, the books still were shared the same way as before, with DRM and expiration dates. They just temporaly removed the limitations of amount of books you can loan and increased the loan period with an initial max end date of June 30.

So, yeah, what IA did is pretty different from robbing anything, in unprecedented times of a global pandemic they provided access to a digital library the same way a public library which holds those books would in normal times.

You are free to give away whatever you want so long as it's yours to give away. For example, the ACM has opened up their pubs during this health emergency which is a nice move on their part. Do I think it would have been preferable for the publishers and IA to reach some sort of agreement? Of course. But, much as I'm a fan of the IA, they shouldn't IMO be doing this unilaterally.

Again, libraries are closed. Libraries do this every day. People are locked in their homes with nothing to do, so they opened their archives as a gesture of goodwill and generocity to a nation of people who cannot get books from libraries. While this may not be legal, it is humane. The problem with this country is that the humane thing is often illegal. We cannot give this food to the hungry, we could be liable.

It's honestly what sucks most about this country: if someone is making money on it, everyone else who comes near it is powerless against it.

Yes, they are breaking copyright law. Who gives a flying fuck about copyright law when there are 100,000 dead people and riots in the streets?

" Who gives a flying fuck about copyright law when there are 100,000 dead people and riots in the streets?"

Plenty of people. Perhaps you haven't heard the news, but it's possible to care about two things at once.

Tell us about your business! Do you have a profitability model yet?

It leverages the first sale doctrine to allow individual owners to access digitized versions of the media they own.

I recently bought out another company that was doing the same thing and ran out of money. I'm still trying to get everything up and running before I start charging people, but my burn rate and cost structure should be manageable.