The Internet Archive's Chris Freeland is the Director of Open Libraries and wrote the IA blog post[1] announcing the NEL change and he acknowledges that it is "unlimited"[2] -- and yet you say it isn't. I don't understand why you contradict IA's own representative. Are you affiliated with IA in an official capacity?

- >Stephanie Willen Brown: So, librarian to librarian, is this unlimited simultaneous users?

- >chrisfreeland: Stephanie – Yes, for the duration of our waitlist suspension![2]

[1] https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...

[2] https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...

Because the "proper context" in this case is what the publishers are filing the lawsuit about. It doesn't matter whether you agree or disagree with the publishers. To the publishers, unlimited simultaneous users is the same as unlimited copies. With public libraries, they paid for limited simultaneous checkouts of digital ebooks which is limited copies and that was acceptable by publishers. In contrast, IA did not pay publishers a license to make copyrighted works available to unlimited users.

The publishers didn't file lawsuits against public libraries; they filed it against IA. In your own words (since you don't object to the word "unlimited" and you thought my summary was unfair), what exactly did IA do that the publishers are filing lawsuit about?

I don't think the plan is to "become the norm". It's an 'emergency library', and it exists currently because the pandemic has forced regular libraries to close.

I don't think this is true for many books, which are scanned copies and available as PDFs or EPubs.

Whatever your thoughts on the IA's practices, it's worth being clear on this.

I'm not debating with you about the details since I haven't used IA's system myself but the last time this came up, a commenter explained that there were a bunch of loopholes in IA's "limits" that it was effectively "unlimited". E.g. after the checkout period expires, you just check out the ebook again. Again, I don't know if this is true.

EDIT to replies equating this to "physical books" : the context of my answer was "digital" ebooks. Physical books are already limited in the sense that libraries' limited budgets only buy limited copies of paper books. So library patrons renewing their borrowed book is "unlimited" on time but not a threat to the publishers because the # of copies are still limited.

I look at things differently though I suppose. I see each human as a parallel processing core, and our immediate consciously recallable set of knowledge as basically being Cached, our referentially recallable knowledge (stuff we know where to find, but don't have in mind) as a pagefile swap, and the unknown, but authored as a compressed, archived file on our collective population-wide hard disk.

So what we're suggesting here, is that certain cores should have to go without access to certain trivially reproducible archives so that the archiving program (publishers) can utilize the product of said cores (analogous to money earned by other work done) to pick the winners and losers of the process of making an archive(I.e. subsidizing authorial works) in the first place?

This sounds like a pretty terrible system to me, and like publisher's have an exaggerated role as gatekeepers in the marketplace of ideas. I would not expect that in the presence of a zero-cost information replication mechanism such an entity performing such a task would be desirable except as an artifact of a programmer having something better to do than to refactor out that quirk of the old high cost implementation.

I wonder how far out I can extend this simulation of society as computing system. I suppose the analog of the necessary inputs for life would be the power electricity bill? Hmmmm.

You know, I think I just nerd sniped myself. I'm not sure if I can complete this post as intended now that I'm continuing to think on it. I'll leave it here in case anyone else wants to join in on extending the metaphor/figuring out where the breaking points are.

And just to drive this completely home, it's not an arbitrary restriction—if a library has a larger budget or a book is more popular, they can buy more copies of the book, which also benefits publishers.

IA's lending is not unlimited, as others have pointed out. From https://openlibrary.org/help/faq/borrow:

> The Internet Archive and participating libraries have selected digitized books from their collections that are available to be borrowed by one patron at a time from anywhere in the world for free. [emphasis mine]

I think we should be careful not to let publishers control the narrative here. Publishers interests in making profits are naturally going to conflict with the public good, and the point of copyright is to promote the latter.