I'm on IA'a side, and publishers have been circling, looking for a vulnerability for years. But IA did technically break it's one one-for-one rules during COVID, as an emergency library, so more people could borrow the same books at the same time.

Sorry but the downvoted comment you are responding to has this correct: the lawsuit was precipitated by the Archive deciding copyright law was null and void “because Covid.”

Instead of “controlled digital lending” which is what you describe at the start of your comment, the Archive was offering unlimited copies of everything it had in its collection.

Note: I fully support format shifting and contend that it’s a logical extension of the Betamax case (time shifting necessarily involves format shifting) and I’m absolutely incensed about those assholes at the Archive doing their level best to give the court an excuse to rule in favor of the publishers.

The publishers could not have asked for a better set of facts to litigate if they had tried.

The Internet Archive is available worldwide.

And yet, they bought one copy of each book in exactly one jurisdiction.

They didn’t bother to buy Canadian, UK, European, Asian, African, etc copies so that the all of the author’s publishers, some of whom might be tiny niche houses like Poisoned Pen or Canongate or Europa Editions who took a chance on an unknown author, also got some income to help them and their staff during the pandemic.

The IA also didn’t bother to limit borrowing to the one jurisdiction where they had bought each book.

The IA ignored the fact that other countries pay authors – not publishers, but straight into the pockets of actual authors – for how often their works are borrowed from libraries through schemes like the UK’s Public Lending Right.

If the IA had won the US court action, they’d have been sued in other courts around the world and they’d have lost repeatedly.

This isn’t publishers bad, IA good.

This is a bunch of tech bros deciding that it’s okay to defraud authors globally out of what could be thousands in income for them.

You’re right that it’s not double dipping. It’s considerably worse than that.

Do I think that the hugest publishing houses act like a monopoly in the US? Yes.

Has anyone yet come up with a way to disrupt that which is fair to authors? No. And they deserve to eat. (As do copy editors and typesetters and everyone else in publishing.)

“Was it all kosher? No”

Then that’s all they need to hear?