That's not clear to me at all.
Here are IA's words:
"as of today, March 24, 2020, the Internet Archive will suspend waitlists for the 1.4 million (and growing) books in our lending library by creating a National Emergency Library to serve the nation’s displaced learners. ... During the waitlist suspension, users will be able to borrow books from the National Emergency Library without joining a waitlist"[1]
That's pretty open and flagrant copyright violation, even if you believe that controlled digital lending is legal, which isn't clear. Piracy isn't a criminal offense - it's a tort. The way to halt and recover from the damages of a tort is to file suit.
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1. https://blog.archive.org/2020/03/24/announcing-a-national-em...
They are the Internet Archive, the archive of freely (in the past) available stuff that can't be found anywhere else, in most cases. This is much more fragile than old books which likely exists in thousands of copies anyway.
I do not admire their stance, and am unhappy that they are recklessly jeopardizing their unique thing to make a case where they have a very big chance to lose, without any circumstances forcing them to do so.
This is not how you serve as a warden of a valuable archive. (I know, I know, it's their right and their choice.)
There is a real and serious risk of having ALL published material eventually fall under "licensed use" instead of ownership.
We're rapidly tipping towards a society where you pay rent to license everything, and own nothing.
In the short term, I find this model abusive. In the long I think it guarantees we will have a competitive disadvantage against countries that don't enforce this style of licensing.
If you're talking about civil disobedience, that's a different matter, but one of the key things about effective civil disobedience is that large numbers of people have to break the law and accept the penalty in order to overwhelm the system and thus show that the law does not have popular support.
Besides that, how many other Internet Archives do you think will follow the one we've been discussing by also flagrantly violating both the letter and the spirit of copyright law?
First sentence of the Wikipedia article.
> The Internet Archive was an American digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge."
Suppose the naysayers are right and they're going to go bankrupt. What happens in bankruptcy? They sell their assets for fair market value.
To a new non-profit that uses them for the same purpose.
All that requires is that they raise an amount of money similar to what they ordinarily have to raise to continue operating regardless. They do, after all, replace all of their computers with newer ones from time to time already.
Maybe.
The other thing that could happen is that their assets get valued by some 3rd party and the publishers own IA's assets as part of the settlement (who presumably destroy them).
That said, sometimes bullies can be turned to buddies through understanding and changing your reactions (see Izzy Kalman) -- but not always. So no simple answers.
If the IA as a specific legal entity if going out of business from this, then what's next for the people and resources involved? As in, how can we archive the archive? Or how can the ideas spread in new ways?
I did not post this there, but as another idea beyond books, the IA could also expand its programs in other ways. For example, as an idea I submitted years ago to a Knight News Challenge on the future of libraries, public libraries could be used (via to-be-written browser plugins or proxies) to archive their local resident's public social media posts and public blog posts and comments on blogs. This archiving would happen as such comments were and submitted to social media services. The people making the posts would be granting permission to their local libraries to archive and republish the content. This could create a freely-accessible and archived public web as essentially a shadow of these social media services. The IA could coordinate that.
At the end of the day I think this will be a battle over whether or not the Internet Archive can continue to exist... and it's incredibly important for them to live to fight another day.
If you get a speeding ticket on a road where you believe the speed limit is unreasonably low, do you "fight" with the cop at the side of the road, or with the transportation department in a meeting room at city hall?
They're doing the former, which just wastes everybody's time and money.
You need a critical mass to be "on the wrong side". That's how marijuana was legalized, for example. Someone has to be the seed crystal around which the critical mass can grow.