622 times is on the high end! The average is less than 50 and the median I'd guess less than 10. But that scan was uploaded by the Internet Archive itself, only

622 times is on the high end! The average is less than 50 and the median I'd guess less than 10. But that scan was uploaded by the Internet Archive itself, only the physical book was donated by a prominent Internet Archive employee. I wonder if the publishers selected it out of spite for him, or even to keep the door open to including him personally in the suit (that would be nasty). Why do you say C. S. Lewis is too old for statutory damages? Do you think the Internet Archive can claim it looked like it could be in the "last 20 years" phase (<https://archive.org/details/last20> https://archive.org/details/last20>)? I don't know... The publishers will probably claim the Internet Archive should know better, but at the same time they claim it doesn't understand a thing about copyright: > IA erroneously decided that they were public domain works based on elementary misunderstandings of copyright law. As for harming sales of books by making those publishers less visible, it will be interesting to see, but it's hard to make predictions. Just to be sure, publishers in their complaint write that IA's lending both increases and decreases sales at the same time: > the traffic that IA drives to Better World Books [by having copies of the books] results in more book sales but: > IA competes directly with Publishers’ works in all formats (including, without limitation, print and digital) and market segments (including, without limitation, commercial, library, and school). Indeed the complaint is mostly focused on purely hypothetical damages based on speculative predictions like: > Consumers begin to view works as cheap and become increasingly unappreciative of what it takes to produce them and unwilling to pay fair value for them. The problem with all these arguments is that they would apply to libraries lending physical books as well, if they were not established yet. Kyle Courtney makes this point: https://kylecourtney.com/2020/05/18/libraries-do-not-need-permission-fair-use-first-sale-and-the-fallacy-of-permission-culture/ https://kylecourtney.com/2020/05/18/libraries-do-not-need-pe...