That's simply not true about their format. Heck I still have copies of books around, they're not protected in any way. And this would not be part of court opinion but in fact finding.

Could be it was 14 days. Don't remember. I remember it as 30 though. That's kind of besides the point though.

The lending model isn't in question, or it is but its not really the core issue. Them distributing illegal copies though is. That's why no, you cannot just exempt distributing digital copies if the original is held. You've still made an illegal copy that you're now distributing. You have to make the copying itself legal in order to make the distribution legal. And if you make the copying legal, well now nothing is stopping you from selling those copies and thus copyright falls. You'd have to completely redo the entire copyright system from the ground up to focus on the distribution instead for your proposal to work but copyright is about the copying, not the distribution.

And there's just so many things wrong with your examples. You can record a show on tv yes, but you cannot distribute that. Or specifically, you cannot record it either if your purpose is to distribute it. You're only allowed to make such copies for personal use, IA is not making copies for personal use.

What you can and cannot copy for a classroom lesson is controlled by deals the school makes. It never allows for copying entire books. For critique, you're again not allowed to just copy the entire thing. It's not that you can't make exemptions, but IA's copying cannot be made an exemption without copyright as a whole falling. I'm all for that, but it's not going to happen.

First sale doctrine doesn't apply between conpanies no. When it's two companies, and both libraries and authors are companies, then the contract terms apply. There are no consumer protections between them. That being said, I don't mean necessarily in terms of public lending rights as some countries have but rather that a book has a limited lifespan before it falls apart and library has to buy another copy. They can't just print out missing pages and stuff like that. So there is that cost of buying (and library books tend to be more expensive because sturdier binding and pages), divided by number of times it was able to be lent out.

It is though. Unless the library gets their books for free, which isn't normal, then they buy the books at a cost. But books have a limited lifespan. The more it's lent out the more it gets worn and eventually it's thrown away and replaced by, buying another copy, which is another cost. That results in that every lending does cost.

Then you commit a crime. Not by retaining the copy but by making it. You generally cannot commit a crime by passivity though such as by not doing something. So simply retaining a copy you legally acquired cannot be illegal. As a comparison, if you rent a car, but never return it, then that's not a crime. It's generally called theft by conversion but it's a civil matter, not a criminal one. In IA's case though, they were the one making that copy. That you could commit the same crime another way doesn't really absolve theirs.