News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive still working to democratize knowledge. Parent comment

Re:Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive still working to ... by zozbot234 on Saturday March 26, 2022 @12:55PM (#30813412)
The books were not given away, they were lent, with significant DRM-enforced restrictions, whilst libraries were closed. What they did was allow multiple users to concurrently borrow a single work in some cases, where previously this wouldn't have been allowed. But they also had the support of multiple physical libraries while doing this, so there's that too.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive still working to ... by teraflop on Saturday March 26, 2022 @09:24PM (#30816895)
The books were not DRM-protected in any meaningful way. They could not have been, given that they were viewable using open source browsers without proprietary plugins.

I remember specifically testing this by borrowing a book, flipping through it, and seeing that the image URLs were all very easily accessible in Firefox's developer tools.

[ Parent | on HN ]