Exactly. I hate fucking everything about this. I love the internet archive and ^nearly all they do.

In principal I love their “covid-19 emergency library” or whatever they called it. In practice? They absolutely know better than to pull stunts and I’m terrified that this will spell the end for one of the greatest knowledge and media resources of the modern age. For shit that was effectively already available to the public through ebook piracy sites.

They already operated on shaky ground, hosting downloads for a metric ton of shit that is unquestionably still under copyright (despite their claims to only be archival of things that are not), skating by on technicalities and by not drawing too much attention to themselves.

Plus, there were so fucking many better ways to do the “free digital library” thing without jeapordizing themselves.

• Have some volunteers “misuse resources”: load an SSD up with the book files, “borrow” some compute power to decrypt/remove drm, pass batches off to existing ebook “dumping” groups to stagger releases and obsfucate the true source. This would ensure that any material they had which was not already available on the high seas would get there.
• Make a big red banner on the site to a blog post with the generic “While we would never condone piracy or copyright infringement, we understand that times are extremely hard right now [blah blah] here are some links to community guides on how to access learning literature (pirate ebooks) during these trying times [blah blah] Please abide by your local laws.”

You summed it up exactly. As one politician put it, the Internet Archive does not decide copyright. They have became to big for there own shoes.

They did not ignore copyright. The judge brazenly and incorrectly dismissed all their arguments for fair use. They had no way to foresee they would meet a judge that would go that far.

I love the internet archive but yeah, there was just no way this wasn’t going to backfire. And by handling things the way they did they damaged the reasonable defense of archivist (not only for themselves) because publishers and others often cite that archival and backups are just “pseudonyms” “synonymous” for piracy.

They aren’t but the way this was handled made it impossible for them to argue otherwise and it also creates a legal precedent for lawsuits and judgments by publishers against others who are doing such work.

it’s a threat to the future of “libraries” that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks

So do I, so this is very bad.