Can you direct me to a book available to borrow in the IA, which both requires copyright protection, and is available to download as a DRM-free PDF? My understanding is that no such book currently exists, nor did it exist in the pre-pandemic regime.
> "Poking the bear by removing these nominal restrictions" is the "branding" I was talking about. Their "emergency library" was a pirate site, plain and simple. You can describe it as a procedural difference from what they were doing before, but that doesn't stop it from being piracy.
I don't think there's any great contradiction in the ideas that a) the barriers the IA had prior to the pandemic (and still has, to my knowledge) against piracy are perfunctory and largely ineffective, b) they are the same barriers that any US-based library with an ebook rental program uses, and c) even slightly weakening those barriers caused the IA to be de facto facilitating piracy in a legal sense, regardless of their intentions.
Vacuous labels. A library provides access to texts; the idea of lending single texts serially just comes from the physical restrictions of physical books, which loses meaning with the electronic format.
A library lends books. There is little difference if the queue is respected when such queue is artificial.
The modalities of accession had a form with the physical book, and may lose meaning with current new formats (there is no natural exclusive access to a single token). So, labelling "piracy" simultaneous access may easily be just vacuous technicality.
2. "Poking the bear by removing these nominal restrictions" is the "branding" I was talking about. Their "emergency library" was a pirate site, plain and simple. You can describe it as a procedural difference from what they were doing before, but that doesn't stop it from being piracy.