Well said. Within the existing framework of copyright law, the emergency open library thing that got them sued seems obviously illegal, despite it being a good thing. What’s good and what’s legal don’t always line up.
The Internet Archive’s work is too important. The library portion (that does controlled digital lending of published books) is nice, but I wouldn’t be too hurt if it goes down. Regular public libraries can fill a lot of that role. But the archive itself is incredible, and losing that would be a huge shame.
Legally, I don’t know that admitting fault and saying sorry does much good, but it certainly isn’t surprising that they got into hot water here.
It probably wouldn’t help their current lawsuit, at this point. Maybe right at the beginning, before it went to court and they could negotiate a bit in search of a reasonable settlement, but at this point they’ve already lost it hard.
What it would do is reassure me that they’re not going to do something dumb like this in the future, which would make me more willing to donate money to them knowing it’ll go to actual internet archiving activities instead of being thrown into big publishers’ pockets as part of more lawsuit settlements.
