That’s not how their book lending works. There are a limited number of copies and they can only be checked out in a DRM-protected format. Unless you strip the DRM from them you cannot print them out.
That’s now their book lending is supposed to work. But they didn’t do that. This lawsuit was launched when the Internet Archive started up the “National Emergency Library”, which instead operated as I described above. There were no limits on how many people could “borrow” the book at the same time, which kind of breaks the whole “borrowing” analogy at a fundamental level.
Again, I think modern copyright law is berserk and modern publishing houses are scum. But when you are carrying a precious archive of information and you go up to some berserk scum and poke them with a stick I think I’m just as angry at the poker as I am at the scum.
Why does that make a difference? They were making copies, that’s copyright violation. The pandemic didn’t suspend copyright law.
