But in this case, it wasn't controlled, right? Even with DRM to "expire" the lent ebook after a certain amount of time, they still ended up distributing the boo

But in this case, it wasn't controlled, right? Even with DRM to "expire" the lent ebook after a certain amount of time, they still ended up distributing the books without restriction on availability. I don't really care about the publishers, but I still wouldn't expect to seriously get away with arguing that I wasn't distributing copyrighted material if I started offering movies online for free in unlimited numbers... because it was just controlled lending since the movie files were set up to probably become unreadable in 3 weeks. I'm sure they have competent lawyers that would've predicted an outcome like this, which makes the decision to do it even more baffling. Especially for an organization that ought to be conservative by design, considering they want to be a very long-term archive.