That is quite literally what this lawsuit is trying to establish as illegal (it was a grey area before).
Many people misunderstand and think it is just about the temporary unlimited lending. It was motivated by that, but went further.
Many people misunderstand and think it is just about the temporary unlimited lending. It was motivated by that, but went further.
Copyright is an artificial constraint on something that is otherwise constrained only by cost of raw inputs and machine labor (even back in the days of setting the lead by hand)... And in that sense, not very constrained at all. The whole thing is an artifice that tries to encourage creation of novel work by couching monopoly on ideas in property law.
This leaves you with a quantum beast that mostly runs on "vibes." To your example: no, illegal, because you made a copy, right there, when you format-shifted. Or yes, because you preserved the total number of instances. Or no, because you moved a tangible format that is easy to preserve singularity on to a hard-to-audit, easy-to-copy format, thus greatly increasing the risk of copyright fiolation. Or yes, because you actually recorded the fact of the position of the ink on the paper in your original copy, and you can't copyright facts ("this is a historical record of what my book looked like"). Or...
Copyright is a ball of string and chewing gum held together by a few explicit laws and many, many centuries of precedent. It's very hard to predict what the end result of a lawsuit in novel territory will be, because it really does come down to "Which faction do the judges think should have more power today?"
Currently the people putting in the bigger volume of “work” are the “we want the money” faction. Those who claim they own every concept that they touch. Because they will get more money if they win they treat it as both a war and a job.
Some legal-decision makers put in a smaller but more personally costly amount of work to fight against them in that war.
And a few in the general public put in work to try to change public opinion so that either the war can end peacefully (the “we own everything we touch” faction dwindles and get phased out) or we can get enough people to join the legal fights so that we can win the war.
Every time we become complacent they gain ground. Every time we make a stand they try to erode it from all sides. It is the active and vigilant effort despite them that makes forward progress possible.
Almost everybody this thread mistakenly believes that the lawsuit is strictly about the unlimited lending that has long since been suspended - it is not.
The lawsuit was provoked by the unlimited lending, but takes a two-pronged approach - it attacks both unlimited and 1-to-1 lending.
The law[1] makes it clear public libraries are permitted to make one digital copy and distribute it (lend it) once at a time on separate occasions. Subsection (g) outlines that distributing that one copy multiple times simultaneously forfeits the protections granted by this law.
The reason IA doesn't rely on § 108 is "When a user requests a copy of an entire work or a substantial part thereof, the library or archives must first make a reasonable effort to determine whether a copy can be obtained at a fair price. If it can, then no copy is allowed to be made." https://www.copyright.gov/policy/section108/discussion-docum...
What you're describing, "public libraries are permitted to make one digital copy and distribute it (lend it) once at a time on separate occasions," is what controlled digital lending refers to, and it would be cool if it was overtly authorized by statute, but it isn't -- the original CDL whitepaper ( https://controlleddigitallending.org/whitepaper/ ) relied on fair use instead. The trial court found that it fails that test, so unless IA wins on appeal, it doesn't exist.