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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

Why should IA get to attribute to itself the inventories of closed public libraries that had no association with IA? What if those libraries wanted to engage in their own digital lending?

It's like the difference between short selling (legal) and naked short selling (illegal). The reason the latter is illegal is because it involved acting as if you owned something that you didn't actually own.

If the IA wanted to treat other libraries' books as its own for the purpose of CDL, they should have (temporarily) acquired a right to do so by entering into an agreement with those libraries.

It's crazy to think that any one entity can unilaterally claim that it is the conduit for distribution of the titles of other libraries besides its own, shuttered or not.

My library is closed between 5pm and 10am every night, and twice a week during the day. Should the IA be able to temporarily claim my library's inventory as its own during those periods?

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> Why should IA get to attribute to itself the inventories of closed public libraries that had no association with IA? What if those libraries wanted to engage in their own digital lending?

It was reasonable to expect that most of them didn't have the technical capacity to accomplish that in the available timeframe.

> It's like the difference between short selling (legal) and naked short selling (illegal). The reason the latter is illegal is because it involved acting as if you owned something that you didn't actually own.

The reason the latter is illegal is that the person you borrow the stock from is getting paid interest to compensate for the risk you become insolvent before you give it back, but the person you're selling it to isn't.

The author is at no risk of "losing principal" in any analogous way.

> If the IA wanted to treat other libraries' books as its own for the purpose of CDL, they should have (temporarily) acquired a right to do so by entering into an agreement with those libraries.

They were closed and possibly unable to be contacted (you call the phone number of a closed library and there is nobody there to answer it), and it was an unexpected event that was having immediate consequences whereas that kind of negotiating was likely to have taken longer than the duration of the emergency to complete.

> It was reasonable to expect that most of them didn't have the technical capacity to accomplish that in the available timeframe.

So what? Just because the owner can't respond in a given timeframe does not give a you (or anyone) the right to appropriate other people's property. By your argument at the height of the Covid lockdowns I would be justified in taking your car & loaning it out to people because you weren't using it and didn't "have the technical capacity to accomplish it in the available timeframe."

The fact that it was a license that IA was assigning to themselves rather than a physical object makes no difference whatsoever.

> Just because the owner can't respond in a given timeframe does not give a you (or anyone) the right to appropriate other people's property.

Inter-library loans are common. It was reasonable to think that more than enough libraries would have agreed to provide the number of books they lent out if it was feasible to contact them.

> By your argument at the height of the Covid lockdowns I would be justified in taking your car & loaning it out to people because you weren't using it and didn't "have the technical capacity to accomplish it in the available timeframe."

That would have deprived the vehicles owner of the use of the vehicle, and created a risk that it could be damaged or worn out through use. You're using an analogy that hinges on the very thing that makes copyright different than personal property.

Also, doing things like that often is permissible, even with personal property, in an emergency.

Yes, we throw a lot of the normal rules out the window in an emergency.

However, to me (and the law), an emergency is "someone is going to die or be seriously injured, and imminent intervention is needed to prevent that."

I know that it sucked that most public libraries were closed for several months.

But nobody needed a copy of my book "Experimenting With Babies: 50 Amazing Science Projects You Can Perform on Your Kid" to prevent imminent serious harm.

If reading my book could have prevented injury or starvation, sure. But there was no "literary emergency" here that required pirating copyrighted material as the only reasonable response.

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