As someone said on a Reddit-thread on this - IA was buying physical copies of newly published books, photoscanning them, and then through the “Emergency Library”-program, granting (at the time) perpetual access to users in excess of the number of purchased books; that a judge (however biased) would side with the publishers against IA in this case was basically a foregone conclusion based on how copyright law works.
Before they initiated this program they did loan out these photoscans, but only to as many borrowers as they owned copies of books, which made it some kind of grey area that wasn’t enough of a bother for the publishers to care about. By not thinking through the “Emergency Library” at all before initiating it, IA has put their whole operation of lending photoscans in jeopardy as the judge in charge of the case thinks it’s copyright infringement.
As someone said on a Reddit-thread on this - IA was buying physical copies of newly published books, photoscanning them, and then through the “Emergency Library”-program, granting (at the time) perpetual access to users in excess of the number of purchased books; that a judge (however biased) would side with the publishers against IA in this case was basically a foregone conclusion based on how copyright law works.
Before they initiated this program they did loan out these photoscans, but only to as many borrowers as they owned copies of books, which made it some kind of grey area that wasn’t enough of a bother for the publishers to care about. By not thinking through the “Emergency Library” at all before initiating it, IA has put their whole operation of lending photoscans in jeopardy as the judge in charge of the case thinks it’s copyright infringement.