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Comment by g-clef | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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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