Lawsuit over online book lending could bankrupt Internet Archive
A lot of the comments claim that publishers could collect $150k per work in statutory damages. However, that usually only works if the book was registered timely with the USCO. I don&#x27;t know the rate among book authors, but most photographers don&#x27;t register, so they don&#x27;t qualify.<p>If the IA was clever to only choose books without registration, then the maximum they can be trialed for is the financial damages that publishers can prove. Given that everyone is trying to save money nowadays, it&#x27;s very hard to convincingly argue that everyone would have bought the book if there had been a waiting list for renting it.<p>I also see the possibility that the IA is just trolling publishers. Maybe they did keep track of the numbers internally and never lent out to more people than they had licenses available through their partners. In that case, the publishers would incur large legal costs only to later be told by the court that nothing illegal had happened.<p>EDIT: There&#x27;s also the claim by the IA that the average user only looks at the book for 30 minutes. That, in turn, would mean that what the publishers call &quot;borrowing&quot; here is more akin to me browsing an in-person library without actually checking out anything. So there&#x27;s a good chance that 2-3 copies of each book are enough to make it difficult to prove this illegal, meaning maybe this is clever trolling after all.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-national-emergency-library-who-needs-it-who-reads-it-lessons-from-the-first-two-weeks&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.archive.org&#x2F;2020&#x2F;04&#x2F;07&#x2F;the-national-emergency-l...</a>