I love the IA. But it is so clear the argument made is written by a lawyer after the fact. Reading between the lines of the lawyer speak: 1. The books were not

I love the IA. But it is so clear the argument made is written by a lawyer after the fact. Reading between the lines of the lawyer speak: 1. The books were not locked up and out of the reach of students. Students were able to take their books home. Yes class was over Zoom. Teaching from the same books previously used in the physical classroom. College classes have done this for decades using physical books for online courses. 2. Public libraries throughout the country ramped up digital online access at the start of COVID-19. Students were able to get online library access. It's possible that some obscure books were non-digital (650 million books seems like a stretch). But, obscure books are mostly unused in the classroom. Schools usually assign students classics like "The Giver” which are digitized. 3. The argument is made that IA has a right to lend the books digitally, because it owns a copy of the books. Because any rational person can understand the quantity of books IA digitized casts doubt on if they own a copy. The argument shifts quickly to saying it had a right to digitize because of its 130 “endorsing” libraries. 4. Some of these 130 libraries did not "endorse" IA until after the lawsuit was filed. By the point of the lawsuit the service had been active for some time. Meaning the copyright infringement had already occurred. 5. IA has lawyers on payroll to advise IA on their main product. Which is archiving of copyrighted web content. Meaning that a lawyer likely advised IA before the service started that a library "endorsing" support for a cause !== to a licensing agreement allowing the endorsed cause to use the endorsing libraries’ licensed content. It should be noted that libraries pay for books. Libraries are a public good and funded by methods such as government funding and donations. Yet they have real expenses. Imagine a city library. Library cards are limited to city residents. For example, think of a city with 1M residents. That puts a cap on the license costs they will pay for content. Imagine IA serving the world 7B or even just the US 365M. Whoever sells content to the library that is co-sharing content with IA would be charged such exorbitant prices either: 1) the library is unable to license content 2) the library shuts down. 3) the library stops working with IA IA can be a library. But they have to act like one. Pay for your content like public libraries do.