My understanding would be that the case only covers whether they broke Fair Use when they created the National Emergency Library (when they started lending out multiple digital copies of one physical book). Although the case going not in their favour would help future case against the one book-one loan policy they currently use. I’d guess as the Internet Archive are US based that any ruling would affect international users the same as US users.

The process is not over yet. IA has been ruled against, but they announced they would appeal. Though I haven’t been following the case in the recent months, and according to the WP article the situation is unclear right now, the parties seem to be negotiating…

Either way, the outcome will definitely affect IA as a whole, and not selectively with regards to the user’s location. If the digitally lended books were distributed illegally in the USA, and IA is located in USA, they have to cease the illegal distribution in general. (It would be absurd if the plaintiffs would have to reassert their case in every country with internet access.)

If the outcome is negative for IA and the court fully accepts Hachette et al’s demands, IA will both have to recuperate the publishers’ supposed losses and legal expenses, and “destroy” all “unlawful copies” of the books under the publishers’ copyright. I paraphrase from the initial complaint by Hachette et al. (see here, first document, from 1st June 2020). This would mean that the books under copyright by publishers other than the four included in the process would not be directly affected. But the ruling may set a precedent, so other publishers might follow suit and demand the same - compensation, and removal of their books from the database.

I am not a legal expert, and not a native English speaker so I don’t know the terminology too well, I just followed the case for a while and this is what I’ve concluded.

Personally, I think IA was horribly stupid to play with fire with the “emergency library”, their legality was in a grey area even before that… And I don’t remember anyone asking for such a measure. But, as far as I’ve seen, the scans themselves will survive even if IA goes down.

Edit: I just saw https://lemmy.world/post/3077301, Jesus Christ…

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