1) Making a copy is not always illegal; for example, scanning books for Google Books by Google is considered legal.
2) Digital books are DRM-protected so you cannot lend them or re-sell like you can with physical books. So making a digital copy of a physical book can be considered merely a method to workaround these restrictions.
3) Publishers want to use new technology (electronic books) to remove rights that consumers had with physical books, to be specific: a right to re-sell the book, a right to lend the book, a right to make archival copies etc.
Making a copy is not always illegal when it is considered fair use or fair dealing. Part of the analysis for determining the same involves the quantity of material copied. They copied entire books. Your other points are entirely irrelevant. They knew what they were doing was wrong, and they jeopardized the archive by doing it. If you want to change the law, change the law. If you want to break the law, break it yourself... don't drag the archive down with you to do it.
> If you want to break the law, break it yourself... don't drag the archive down with you to do it.
It takes a court decision to know if the law was broken or not. You apparently forget that the Wayback Machine itself breaks copyright laws and went to court over this many times. Most cases were settled by removal of infringing content but it doesn't undo the fact that infringements did actually happen.
The IA exists in the first place because Brewster Kahle isn't afraid to test what's possible and go to court if necessary.
You can take it or leave it. Or you can build your own archive... oh wait, you can't because it breaks the copyright law which is unacceptable for you.
> It takes a court decision to know if the law was broken or not.
It takes only a working mind to know that, and the court's decision was obvious to most before it was rendered. This could have been foreseen (and was).
> You apparently forget that the Wayback Machine itself breaks copyright laws and went to court over this many times.
...and they had good reason to do so then as there were fair use arguments to be made in favor of what they'd done. That was not the case here, and they were warned repeatedly and chose to ignore that advice.
> The IA exists in the first place because Brewster Kahle isn't afraid to test what's possible and go to court if necessary.
There's a difference between being unafraid and being foolish. Guess which one this was.
> You can take it or leave it. Or you can build your own archive... oh wait, you can't because it breaks the copyright law which is unacceptable for you.
Ah yes, except for that whole fair use thing and explicit carve-outs for the actually legal work they do, which I've been commending throughout this entire thread. Please take your blackwhite thinking elsewhere. It's not productive.
Wayback Machine is NOT fair use, you just invented that out of thin air. They produce full copies of copyrighted content, store them and make them available for the general public. They have been sued repeatedly over the content they host and the content in question was removed. There were no explicit carve-outs that I'm aware of.
Now the same thing happens with the CDL: they're sued over the content they host, they try to defend their rights, they lose and now will have to remove the content. Somehow you're upset and knew from the start they would fail.
> Please take your blackwhite thinking elsewhere. It's not productive.
This is amusing because your position of "don't break the law, change the it first, then do what you want" IS what's unproductive. Laws don't change when no one breaks them, it's works the other way round.
All these "carve-outs' and "fair use thing" you value so much appeared because it was demonstrated on practice they are necessary. People fought for their rights, people challenged the laws, people demonstratively broke the laws and laws changed as the result. There's no other way.
> 1) Making a copy is not always illegal; for example, scanning books for Google Books by Google is considered legal.
I believe I remember this was tried at one point too. The significant difference here is that Google has seemingly unlimited money to throw towards lobbying and court cases
> The Second Circuit agreed with the district court’s ruling that Google’s digitization and subsequent use of the copyrighted works was fair use. In concluding that Google’s use was transformative, the circuit court found that “Google’s making of a digital copy to provide a search function . . . augments public knowledge by making available information about [p]laintiffs’ books without providing the public with a substantial substitute for matter protected by the [p]laintiffs’ copyright interests in the original works or derivatives of them.”
> ...
> Regarding the Google Books project’s potential to impact the market for or value of the copyrighted works, the circuit court held that—despite the search function’s potential to cause “some loss of sales”—the brevity of the snippet search results and the “cumbersome, disjointed, and incomplete nature of the aggregation of snippets made available through snippet view” make it unlikely that Google’s use could “provide a significant substitute for the purchase of the author’s book.”
2) Digital books are DRM-protected so you cannot lend them or re-sell like you can with physical books. So making a digital copy of a physical book can be considered merely a method to workaround these restrictions.
3) Publishers want to use new technology (electronic books) to remove rights that consumers had with physical books, to be specific: a right to re-sell the book, a right to lend the book, a right to make archival copies etc.