> In a brief submitted on behalf of the publishers, the Authors Guild argued that Kahle and supporters of the Internet Archive need to "recognize that rights av

> In a brief submitted on behalf of the publishers, the Authors Guild argued that Kahle and supporters of the Internet Archive need to "recognize that rights available to owners of physical books simply did not make sense in the digital era," the Times summarized. Digital content is inherently different from print "because it is infinitely copyable and unprotectable," said copyright lawyer Mary Rasenberger, the chief executive of the guild. If "anyone could call themselves a library" and operate like the archive did when they shared copies of physical books, "writers would have absolutely no control over their work anymore," she added. This has always struck me as a weird argument. Digital does not make copying infinite any more than the Gutenberg printing press made copying infinite. What both inventions did was make copying more democratic, and the instruments of the state and the creative industry had to spend time and money bringing it back under control. "Unprotectable" is a particularly strange argument because part of the CDL scheme literally involved wrapping all the lended-out ebooks with DRM, specifically so that they couldn't be copied further. What IA (and ReDigi before it) wanted was a world in which copies made to effect the same rights that are associated with physical sale - and no further - were legal. The world in which the publishers and the law lives in is one where burning a book and then printing out a replacement copy is infringing. Which is stupid and petty. Publishers want to point out that the fragility of physical media was the price paid for first sale, but digital copies are similarly fragile. In fact, they're even more fragile because they die when the DRM server they're locked to gets shut down. And nobody was actually delicately balancing fragility against author's rights when first sale was put into caselaw. They were balancing author's rights against owner's rights. Writers having absolutely no control over their work is laughable. First, because you are publishers. Your business model literally involves taking control away from writers and putting it in the hands of professional marketers and salespeople. Second, because the IA CDL theory doesn't actually take any more control away than what first sale did. You're angry that the 50-year-old campaign you mounted to completely strip everyone of ownership might have been slightly slowed by your own DRM tools. Anyway, rant over, I'm just glad they decided not to completely burn down the Internet Archive. I can only imagine the RIAA is going to have even more mind-irritating arguments.