I overall agree with the ruling against IA. And to be clear: I'm a pretty staunch open source / libre software advocate. > The IA maintained that it could, as

I overall agree with the ruling against IA. And to be clear: I'm a pretty staunch open source / libre software advocate. > The IA maintained that it could, as long as it lent only the same number of copies it owned and locked down the digital copies so that a borrower could not copy or redistribute them. Let's drop the act and be real here: You cannot lock down digitally distributed files in any way which offers reasonable guarantees that someone remotely sophisticated couldn't copy them. Considering that, I think its necessary that the publishers and authors have approved and accepted (1) the distribution itself, and (2) the systems which protect the copying of their work. In the digital world, for example: they've generally approved of Kindle as a digital distribution retailer, and they've approved of the Kindle System (DRM, locked down hardware, etc). They clearly did not approve of IA distributing their work, nor I assume did they approve of whatever DRM scheme IA came up to help protect themselves from legal retribution. (sidenote: the fact that IA put DRM on it at all kind of whispers to me that they knew this lawsuit would be coming, they knew what they were doing had shaky legal foundations, and while I have an immense amount of respect for what they do and their mission, knowingly breaking the law isn't respectable even if you disagree with it). But step out of the digital world and into the physical one. The same rules apply. Publishers would generally approve of Barns and Noble distributing their books; easy enough. But to the second point, implicitly: Publishers have also accepted the inherent physical laws of our universe which protect, not wholly but significantly, works from being copied at scale. There's no DRM protecting physical books; no swipe of your ID card to unlock them; its just physically hard to copy them, its physically hard to take a book off your shelf and hand it to a friend in-person. When you view those facts relative to how easy it is to copy even DRM-protected eBooks, or how easy it would be to just "send" a digital book to anyone, anywhere on the planet, at any time, instantly; it makes a lot more sense to me why publishers are scared of allowing things like this. In other words: Applying the metaphor of a physical book to a digital one is a fundamentally misguided action because digital books are fundamentally different in the ways copyright has historically cared about. If a man in Norway messages me and asks to borrow my physical copy of Hunger Games; I'm going to say no. If he asks to borrow my digital copy, all hypothetically handled in Kindle, just enter his email, I can click a button to "get it back" at any time, instantly: I'm going to say Yes.