You don’t have to call yourself a library in order to keep or possess works copyrighted by others. You are only restricted from making new copies and distributi

You don’t have to call yourself a library in order to keep or possess works copyrighted by others. You are only restricted from making new copies and distributing those new copies to others. You may make new copies for archival or other personal purposes, provided you don’t distribute them to others. You may, however, distribute to others the copies that you got from someone else. (You can lend, sell, or give them away; all are legal.) That is, if you buy a copy of some copyrighted work (such as a book or CD or a computer game), you can legally sell that copy on to someone else. You can also duplicate that work for your own purposes, provided you don't distribute those copies to anyone else. Naturally if you have made copies for personal purposes, you are supposed to destroy them if you pass the “original” copy on to someone else. If you don’t then you have made additional copies and distributed them, which is copyright infringement. That is one reason that the Internet Archive keeps their “original” copies of any physical item that they digitize in one of their warehouses. It is also why they keep track of how many of those “original” copies that they possess, and use that to limit the number of digital copies that they lend out at any one time. It is also why they try to keep track of the original publication date of those works, so that they can open them up to unlimited distribution once they get old enough that they no longer qualify for copyright protection. In few days, pretty much everything created in the US in 1927 becomes part of the Public Domain! <https://blog.archive.org/2022/11/30/public-domain-day-2023-remix-contest-the-internet-archive-is-looking-for-creative-short-films-made-by-you/ https://blog.archive.org/2022/11/30/public-domain-day-2023-r...>