It would help if we knew even just a smidgin of what these titles are.
How many are republishings? Just curious
There’s absolutely a good number of duplicates among the list they shared.
The bigger implication is of the 4 publishers in this lawsuit, 3 of them are in The Big Five publishers, who hold rights to the vast majority of books (60-80-ish % of English language books) from this century and probably a good chunk of the last one. If they win, this is the tip of the iceberg.
Would a compromise be to simply archive them but not make them freely availible until they enter public domain.
For more current book; if they are out of print then they can be made availbe for limited loan, like any other digital library. If a digital copy is avalible for purchase from the original publisher/author, than its not fair game. Unless they come to an agreement, perhaps add supported for freely accessing a book otherwise available for purchase.
If they got rid of the download option, it would make it much more difficult to just use a DRM stripping tool (a friend told me about these terrible pirating tools, I certently don’t know how to use then). A lot of digital libraies have a dedicated app that you can only view content from. Utilize whatever anti-screen capture systems banks and Netflix use to protect from simply taking screen shots. Make is easier to access the books legitimatly than it is to pirate them.
Lastly, don’t just make everything freely availible next time there’s a world crisis.
Please inform yourself. In these comments and on their website, it is covered that they do not provide books freely. Just like any other library books can be borrowed exactly as many times as they own a copy.
Just like any other library they sometimes provide a download for Adobe Digital Edition, which manages your lends on books. But as your friend with DRM stripping tools for sure can confirm: DRM is just an annoyance for legitimate customers, it forces legitimate users to use specific applications, while pirates get the freedom to choose how they interact with the not any more protected media. But this is a discussion for another thread as archive.org treats copyrighted books just like any other library.
No, they don’t.
Other libraries don’t make unauthorized copies. The “fair use” argument is laughably weak and was rejected by the court because the law is pretty clear that it’s not legal.
