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Comment by iAMkenough | Hacker News Reader

Are other digital libraries engaged in the same behavior in question? If not, how are they providing similar services? If they're not providing similar services, this argument falls apart: "it will take away a library’s ability to lend books from its permanent collections to digital learners."

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As I understand it, other digital libraries buy (license) n digital copies of a book and then never lend to more than n people at once. IA would permit an unlimited number of people to borrow at once.

That's not right. Under controlled digital lending, the Internet Archive only allows simultaneous loans up to the number of copies they actually own. The difference between the Internet Archive and other libraries is that the Internet Archive does this with or without the approval of the rightsholders, whereas most other libraries buy in to services from copyright collectives that have negotiated for digital lending from the rightsholders, not unlike performing rights organizations for music or studio catalogs on Netflix.

Wasn't the whole point that they removed that restriction during the declared "emergency library" period, despite previously doing CDL properly? They were still loaning out DRM'd files, with a limit on the number that a given user could have on loan, but crucially no longer a limit on the number of simultaneous users on a single title. Breaking the whole point of CDL which is to mimic the "move semantics" of a physical item

No. (That is a thing that happened. It's not relevant here—and definitely not "the whole point"—but it did happen.)

Unfortunately IA falsely inflated the number of copies they permitted themselves to loan out even before they declared the national emergency library. I think controlled digital lending would be beneficial to society so I'm frustrated IA sabotaged it by setting up such bad facts for the court to consider.

All the libraries I’m a user of (and there are a half dozen or so) have licensed all the content through Overdrive (Libby).

I don’t know how Overdrive licenses it from publishers.

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