Really the main (even only?) thing "broken" about copyright is the terms. (ADDED: I generally favor orphan works legislation but I also get the argument that this is also more likely to favor corporations than individuals.)

And basically all the schemes to make copyright more expensive, difficult, requiring jumping through hoops and paying increasing amounts of money to renew? That just basically screws individual creators (who already don't make much money for the most part) to the benefit of the major content rights holders who are not going to forget or be unable to pay for copyright renewal. Which is probably not the objective of most of the people dreaming these up.

The US actually took a pretty big step towards benefitting more small-time creatives when it aligned with the Berne Convention and did away with explicit notices being required.

>Books frequently get popular long after initial publication.

Is that relevant?

To me copyright is there to encourage the creation of new works. I doubt any publisher takes into account book sales more than 5 years out when deciding whether to publish a new book.

I have artist friends. Current copyright acts as more of an inhibitor than enabler of their creativity.

Yes. This would really hurt the ability for authors to make a living if everyone could do what the IA claims the right to do. It just won't work for sales to be cut off after a few physical copies by digital copies everywhere.

Is there really no middle ground between “five years after publication” and “seventy years after the last author’s death”?

What differentiates libraries from the IA in this context, though?

A system where judges ignore the law and just rule based on their general gut feeling, is much worse.

Judges are there to enforce the law, not to make it. You can't hope that the judge takes your side because then the judge could just as easily take the other side. There is of course an element of interpretation which the judges can use to decide in different directions over the same thing, but that again is an example of a broken law.

Could the law be nullified? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_(U.S._Constitu...

Louisiana has a civil law system, subject to the Federal Constitution.

Getting involved, grass roots style. The feeling of powerlessness is exactly the way you become inert to do anything. “What can I do.”

Politics work from the local to the national, so getting involved locally is a good thing, or organizations that work to promote the ideals you want to see in the world.

Odd to open asking what actions Americans can take, and then closing with a bizarre appeal to a noble wealth hoarder.

What can we do? Uncap the House. Repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929. The billionaires easily bribe 435 reps, several thousand would be harder. And in line with historical representation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/uncapthehouse

As an non-USA inhabitant, one thing I see is that you have a lot more voting chances than most countries. I heard e.g. you can vote for officials like sheriffs and stuff.

So don't only vote for a president, vote for everything you can. Become member of both parties, and vote for presidential candidates at both sides.

I think after that, you shouldn't be afraid to 'throw your vote away'. Gerrymandering and other stuff made most voters in the presidentials irrelevant. So the only voice left there is the signal function of 3rd part vote. Make it clear yo don't like the hobson's choice you've left. You did what you could in the previous round.

Don't succumb to nihilisms. The powers that be seem to have dividers in a dumber and smarter half. The dumber half gets very simplistic reasons to vote for some extremist side. The smarter half gets tamed by nihilistic passiveness. Both get all kinds of divisive news as a side dish. Don't fall into this trap. A big enough group of people aligned around a common cause is the biggest danger to any powerfull entity, and they fear them and do anything to break them up.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Perhaps have chatgpt search through drafted laws to identify inconsistencies, curtails to liberty, and evidence of self-interest…

Entirely open (at best) question, which no smug hacker news commenter is going to answer. What does one do?

(My current longshot hope? Digital democracy, on the backs of open source production economies running on the latest AI for highly-accessible/affordable data processing / labor. If we just start making online group decisions and scale it up, that's a power bloc that can run its own parties and strongarm existing gov processes - assuming the network even wants to interact with them... )

> yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless

Not sure what a "functionally meaningless vote" is; is that simply a vote cast for the losing side? If something is to be decided by a vote, then one side of the argument is going to lose, otherwise you don't need a vote.

I bet in your county it would take the dedicated organization of maybe 10-25 people to tilt who is out on the ballot in your local government. (If your county is much larger, you may need 50 or so.) register for a minor party and then only nominate members of that minor party that fit your views. A friend of mine in his smaller town was able to, with his local family, put on only democratic candidates under Republican nominations because his family had minor party share.

A decade ago, activists made a difference protesting SOPA and PIPA.

The slowness and lethargy of the system is by design. For instance, The constitution is really hard to change to prevent tyranny. Checks and balances against power protect all our rights. There is no garauntee that the people in power will choose your path forward. There is also no garauntee that the majority view is yours. Hitler for example was elected. The system was setup to ensure for hundreds of years at the price of short term inefficiency. Read the history of an imploding republic - France, Rome, Weimar - and you will see similar pushes to speed reform for the masses that ended in tyranny. Reading the federalist papers will give good perspective on the rationale for these things. One may disagree with the conclusions, but the concerns and rationales are reasonable

Aside from the two party system, this is all working exactly as designed.

>wherein for example more people can vote for Trump in California than Texas in 2020 yet each of those person's votes are functionally meaningless.

Executive election and apportionment of electoral votes are specifically a matter for States to determine the implementation details of. Therefore, any complaints on that front are entirely California's problem.

> or, republicans can fail for over two decades and still elect three presidents in that time

...The Chief Executive is determined in a two-fold election pipeline. A popular vote to elect State electors to cast votes for the President The number of electoral votes is set by a Constitutionally defined function that strikes a balance to ensure the most populous states can't steamroll the less populous. The means of choosing who the electors are are up to the States. Original intrnt was that Electors were unaccountable to anyone, as the Founders wanted a specific check on demagoguery, as they greatly feared the charismatic charlatan who could work a crowd, and believed a second smaller unaccountable party of voters would either eventually reconfirm the majority if it was a genuinely uncontroversial decision, or conscientiously object if they could not in good conscience believe it was in the best interests of the nation to cast that vote. The Founders believed a person was virtuous. People were easily led and prone to being swindled by a charismatic speaker.

The popular vote literally was antithetical to what the Founders set put to do. It was specifically not the system they wanted to get anywhere near.

>Or the fact that California gets very few senators per person whereas north Dakota gets a much larger power per citizen in the Senate,

This is by design. The Senate represents the States. Not the People directly. Each state gets two Senators, no matter how big, no matter how populace. Only the House Scales as a function of Population. The Senate is specifically a check on the House. It was recognized that the House would be the Heart/Vehicle of the People's passions. The Senate was intended to be a smaller, more rational filter to keep the House checked as Reason is the check on Passion.

Again. Working as designed/Civics 101.

That's the Supreme Courts job?

The constitution.

I'm confused. You act hostile yet you seem to agree with the original comment.

The reason Row v Wade was overturned is that the judges don't want to have to decide if abortion is legal or not. They want legislators to be responsible for that.

You, the judges, and the parent comment are all in agreement here.

If I have a physical object, you can't also have that physical object. That's natural in the sense that it follows from natural law (physics).

If I have an idea, or a digital copy of something, you can also use that idea, or also get a digital copy, without depriving me of it. The only reason you can't use my idea or own a digital copy is because society decided that it would punish you for doing so – and that's unnatural in the sense that it doesn't follow from any inherent feature of reality.

It’s kind of true that idea of IP is entirely made-up, but it’s also important to recognize that it was made up to support and safeguard author’s living.

IP allows authors to require values of content to be preserved, recognized, and financially rewarded(in one-time or recurring payments).

In the absence of IP, printing companies can take manuscripts and contents to profit off of copies free-for-all style, bankrupting manuscript writers.

However, it was NOT designed to protect interest of multinational megacorporates, causing individual contributors to be ignored and paid for presence in its making than input in the product; such use of IP is basically a polar opposite of its intent.

We should stop allowing corporates to take ownership of IPs.

J.K. Rowling enjoying her life is fine, that is intellectual property as intended. “(C)Disney” or “(C)2023 Electronic Arts. All Rights Reserved.” is not. Those latter cases is how and where IP laws are not working as intended.

The most obvious distinction between intellectual property and ordinary property is their history. Ownership of things has existed for longer than reliable records are available. Copyright and patents, by contrast, were created during the late Renaissance in response to the particular economic circumstances of the time. They have since become the tools of entrenched interests who would rather suggest that things have always been this way and we couldn't live without it.

Is anything humans do natural? The only thing that can make something unnatural, so far as we understand it, is human intervention. Insofar as we conceive of unnaturalness as a recognizable quality of phenomena, it is more acute when the humans responsible are more sophisticated in their methods. We can easily observe a very large difference between the primitiveness of human society when it created the ownership of things and the much more advanced culture that devised what we now call intellectual property. From this construction of what is natural and what is not, we clearly find that intellectual property is much less "natural", though there is still the necessity of accepting that "natural" can be a meaningful idea at all.

If people always beat me up and snatch my stuff the moment I am not looking, that's not very good living. Even if I am wealthy enough to hire guards, they can turn on me at any moment and get all my stuff rather than just what I am willing to pay. So we opt for a peaceful, honest society where people are not allowed to hurt each other, steal or break contracts. On the other hand, if I learn from other people and they learn for me, we all become smarter and more productive.

Physical objects cannot be shared. I can’t create a copy of my car. But ideas can and will be shared. Our societies try to criminalise it. That’s not right. It does not help humanity in making advances.

Imagine a world where every human has access to all ideas, papers, books, thoughts. That’ll empower every human being who has access to it.

We need to find other ways to compensate authors and creators.

It's a scale. Laws against murder and theft of food are highly natural (e.g. most social cooperative animals will have something like it), zoning laws are more unnatural.

I agree with you.

We can simply say IP is a concept that we need to bust. And that's fine. No need to invoke weird "reasoning" like that.

Real physical scarcity is that law. Intellectual property is logically reducible to ownership of numbers. Some numbers are illegal for man to know. You can't write down some numbers on a piece of paper without someone else's permission. Or maybe you can but you can't give the paper to someone else. That's how stupid all of this is.

>What laws? All natural rights, life (bodily functions e.g. the right to eat not to have something to eat), speech, association etc. Broadly defined as anything a person can do that doesn't require violence or compulsion.

If someone says something in public then I have the right to say it. A way to get around this is by making every viewing of copyrighted material a private contract. e.g. "You can only own a license for personal use of this movie if pay and agree not to share it." But, if somebody does break that contract and shares the movie publicly, going only by natural rights everyone who watched it would be able to share. Since book publishers didn't like this they lobbied for our current "unnatural" copyright laws.

Why people don't like this now generally falls into three camps with some overlap 1) People who want free books, movies and software. 2) People who want all books, movies and software to be libre. 3) People who don't want the government to create a protected class of license holders, for various reasons (anticommunism, traditionalism etc.)

Is there a such thing as morality or ethics? Is there any action that is unethical?

Assuming such an organization existed, what would stop someone from using their name, logo, etc. to also promote enhancing IP law and undermine they’re entire message? Presumably they wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to sue you for that, would they?

Wait a few more months... let's see what the bittorrent and private crypto folks end up doing with AI... Either way, IP is going to either accept defeat or get very very loose in its claims, as the ability is almost here to just process a feature-length film, slightly modify each scene and replace script, camera angles, environments and actors with generic IP-free amalgamations, all while still capturing the tone and story... Images/text/code are already done for. Who's going to enforce that, and how much similarity do you need to infringe? Who's going to prove you processed that film when nothing about your movie is quite the same?

Most anarchocommunists are against IP, so the wobblies (IWW) are a good shout.

> I’d rather have both have short, free terms with copyright extendable by a tax,

Why allow extension at all?

The initial term serves as a societal "thank you for that cool idea". I'm not sure I agree that financial success should mean society continues to award you exclusive rights to the idea.

Applying modern intellectual property law to "base" inventions illustrates how ridiculous it is. Should we be paying a tithe to the descendants of the person that built the first wheel? Would humanity have been better off if it had prevented anyone other than that individual from building wheels without their express permission? The answer is clearly no. That individual benefited personally from their invention and from the improvements to efficiency in the rest of their society. Restricting that would only have served to impede further innovation, prosperity, and quality of life.

Human rights and democracy are nothing like IP.

Dont be shitty to people and listen to their voice are thing that any group of children playing may come up with them selves.

Those same children will copy each other and build on ideas each other have.

Thi child who demands no one can play a game or any derivative because they came up with it first, well, they are just not very nice.

Being political reality doesn't save something from being intellectually discredited. The fact that people need propaganda such as "president" as you mention supports that, because the very idea of monarchy and aristocracy are impossible to sell these days. These systems can only survive through lies and confusion or brute force and neither has anything to with having any intellectual credibility.

as it should be peasant. now get back to work!!! /s

with the concept of 1%ers and how imbalanced the wealth distribution is, it doesn't really seem like it's much different than the days of feudal lords. it just seems like we've been tricked into thinking there was a middle class to keep the revolting to a minimum.

Do we actually need monetary incentives to get people to create new things. Won't people naturally keep creating new things as long as they aren't constrained by a more fundamental need? So we really just need to create a society where nobody has to worry about their basic needs like housing, food, healthcare, etc...and then people are free to create and are even free to fail while doing so.

The whole Reinassence happened without copyright law and they did just fine.

In fact, a lot of masterpieces we have from that period would have been illegal under current IP law because they were the result of a lot of iteration on the same concepts by different artists.

Maybe there's a middle-ground between zero IP and the near perpetual IP we have right now.

Additionally, we must keep in mind in those debates that piracy causing loss of revenue has never been proven and is an urban legend.

Have you read the ragged trousered phillanthropists?

It might, as history has cycles.

But not because it will be replaced with something "better". Democracy just means everybody has a say on decisions affecting them and the society they are in.

If your replacement is closer to "only informed people should have a say", that is even older then democracy, and is much worse in practice.

Quite possibly, society doesn't sit still, but it's still an improvement from before in modern constitutional republic context. Beats going to war to change rulers.

I'm not OP, but personally, I can totally get behind that. It is not up to the law to tell me who can be my friend. If I decide that all of humanity are my friends then I should be able to share anything I want with them.

I don’t disagree with the ruling. IA is not lending their copy that they purchased. They are lending a copy of their copy. While that copy is lent out, they are still free to, I.e. read the copy in their possession.

Replying to your edit: The format shifting argument and first sale doctrine are discussed in the ruling. Notably in the section headed ‘3’ starting on page 28 - but also in other places.

"Alpaca III, can you write an accurate page-by-page summary of every page of Book-I-Want-To-Read, where each summary's one page long and as faithful to the original pages content and length as possible, fully quoting each page permitted?"

My point being: as technology marches on the ageing concept of "owning" entirely fungible digital material becomes less and less valid. It is already at a stage meaninglessness is flirting with it in a new way daily and that will continue.

Really, we need to let it go.

Now that I think about it, not being able to own anything is a good reason to start stealing. Think about it, why is stealing bad? Usually, this is an application of the Golden Rule. If you don't want people to steal the stuff you own, you shouldn't steal their stuff either. However, if you are no longer allowed to own anything (just like under communism), then the argument falls apart. Realistically, information wants to be free, and spreading it is much easier than controlling its spread. I expect the current copyright wars will come into an end in a decade or two, ending in the loss of the copyright mafia as society reconsiders the concession that is the copyright system.

The article doesn't seem to understand the issue.

Whether a copy of a work is fair use turns on, amongst other things, the effect of the copy on the potential market for the original. The article acknowledges this.

Controlled Digital Lending competes directly with the licensing scheme publishers have for library ebooks. The fair use argument was always doomed to fail.

The article then completely ignores the copyright argument and tries to equate CDL with libraries loaning out their physical copies. This is completely absurd, since libraries do not distribute duplicates of their physical books and so do not even enter the realm of copyright.

If libraries were systematically distributing duplicates of their existing books they would be sued for copyright infringement.

> that they don’t deteriorate the way that physical books do

Wow, so they're arguing that the destruction of the sold good is implicit in the sale, and that preventing that is therefore illegal.

100 years? Seems hyperbolic.

And you don’t need to do anything at all; all of these books have been freely available on IRC for years.

> I would start a webtorrent+ipfs+i2p site

Libgen?

> Don't many community/government libraries do this?

Those books are licensed to the libraries by the publishers. The introduction of the opinion here explains how it works:

> This dispute concerns the way libraries lend ebooks. Public and academic libraries in the United States spend billions of dollars each year obtaining print books and ebooks for their patrons to borrow for free. Pls.’ 56.1 ¶ 113. Libraries usually buy their print books from publishers or wholesalers. Id. ¶ 114. Copies of ebooks, however, are typically not bought but licensed to libraries from publishers through distributors called “aggregators.” Id. ¶ 117. The Publishers task aggregators with ensuring that a library lends its ebooks only to the library’s members. Id. ¶¶ 123, 125. The Publishers also require aggregators to employ approved “digital rights management” (“DRM”) software and other security measures to prevent unauthorized copying or distribution of ebook files. Id. ¶ 126.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53..., page 3 (emphasis added).

Is this just ebook lending? Is that popular among local libraries?

I thought Kindle/Nook/Apple books/etc completely dominated that market. Reading PDFs on computers/tablets for long form stuff never made much sense to me. I'm curious if local libraries get much traction from their digital libraries.

I could see audiobooks getting locked down being a big hit though. Audible has a monopoly on that harder than ebooks ever experienced.

Pretty sure fractional reserve banking passes the "do rich people make money from this" test, and is therefore fine.

It means you are not legally allowed to lend them or sell them, even if you lose the original DVD and even though you did have the right to lend or sell the original DVD.

Seriously.

Has there been any kind of movement towards a law that would automatically put zombie works into the public domain?

It really doesn't seem unreasonable that if a book, film, recording, or video game hasn't been generally available for sale over the past 5 or 10 years it becomes public domain. Use it or lose it, in other words.

Although it might really only apply to past works. Because while physical books go out of print, e-books will probably be available forever, no?

Zombie works are free to share if there truly is no rightsholder pressing claims.

What happened to Google Books?

I would argue the artist still deserves to retain value, regardless of the size of it unless they give it up. If it expires, sure it's public domain.

Even better: https://annas-archive.org/

LibGen's selection of these kinds of books is nowhere near that of the Internet Archive.

I guess I'm going to have A LOT more interlibrary loans in my future.

This was going to be my next question with basic assumption that the entire gathered information will either vanish, get moved to torrents or splintered across various believers of the cause.

“We will appeal.”

https://twitter.com/internetarchive/status/16394247772647219...

> the publishers take issue with only 120 or so books

Not quite. The plaintiffs have to name some specific works on which to base the case. The 120 is enough because the statutory damages for just those 120 works could be a staggering amount that would bankrupt IA.

The complaint [0] also asks for an injunction enjoining IA from any further infringement of "any of the respective copyrights owned or exclusively controlled, in whole or in part, by Plaintiffs, whether now in existence or hereinafter created." [0] at 51.

[0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...

Better chance of staying alive and complete if they can remain in the US but additionally we build seperate archives in the EU, Russian and as many geographically and politically distant regions as we can.

To be more specific, the Betamax case is the reason a specific person can store a copy of a TV recording that they made, for timeshifting purposes, because SCOTUS held that that person's use of the recorded TV content, in that circumstance, was fair dealing with respect to the recorded TV content. And that's it.

If you provide a recording service, you had better be as close as you possibly can to that fact matrix. Any hint that it's you, and not your users, who are doing the copying, would attract the wolves.

Also, this focus on who is doing the copying has been looked at enough in different jurisdictions around the world that it's probably not worth the risk testing it. Germany (Save.TV, Shift.TV), Japan (Rokuraku II), Australia (Optus TV Now). Don't quote me on these, this is off the cuff.

I am from BC and the Sunday no shopping was a bit before my time but my dad talks about how stupid it was. If you had a problem and needed something in an emergency well too bad. Didn’t realize you were low on bread and forgot to get it Saturday oh well kids are not getting a sandwich in their lunches for Monday morning school. Like you say eventually people realized the fines were actually just the cost of doing business. Those who opened up sundays made a killing because that is what the people wanted. I know a guy who did the same for opening a marijuana shop. Did it just before it was legal and was getting a $150 fine each day from the city. He said just a cost of business as he was making several thousand or more each day.

Same in England. In Scotland there were no strong laws against Sunday shopping, apparently because nobody thought any shop would even think about opening. So when they did, and everyone went shopping, folks in England complained that they wanted what Scotland had.

>"I didn't agree with it then and I don't fully agree with it now, but it can work."

I actually do agree with it. Same reason as jury nullification. If enough people (jury members in this case) believe that the law / particular application is unjust then fuck it. In nullification the government must give in. I do not see why it should be any different in general. The key here should be what constitutes "enough"

Listing a place a law was broken to advocate for repeating it is not good advice. The proper metric is to see how many times laws are broken and how often that works out for the lawbreaker.

IA is learning the difference, unfortunately.

Do you disagree because of the Sabbath?

Not with such a completely one sided court case. If anything, this will probably kill the Open Libraries (lending digital books backed 1:1 by real copies of them) model of lending entirely (the court decision mentions no right to digitally lend copyrighted material). Publishers seemed to not really care about it before the IA covid library stunt, but now it might very well die.

Sometimes, but its also how people end up in prison.

Libraries are exempted from statutory damages if they had a good faith belief that their usage was Fair Use. The published opinion defers the question of exemption.

Statutory damages are the most significant risk to IA's finances, both in this case but also wrt other potential plaintiffs who might be waiting in the wings. Exemption almost certainly figured into IA's risk assessment when designing and deploying their loan program. The argument for exemption is, naturally, stronger than for Fair Use.

The consequences may be the loss of the entire Internet Archive, if it can't afford to both pay the fines of deciding to ++++ around and find out with book publishers and running its servers at the same time.

I don’t know about Airbnb. But you realize that before Uber existed, people ran businesses which were entirely, “you call us up, we’ll send you a car and take you where you want to go,” (And that driver was an independent contractor)

I really don’t see the angle that Uber was doing something fundamentally new, except to the extent that they dramatically lowered the price and a lot more people used the service.

> if libraries were new today there’s no way that book publishers would let them exist

;-)

Same for broadcast radio vs. record companies.

And DVRs vs. streaming video companies. Oh wait...

> system shouldn't require lobbying to get results that benefit the greater good

It does when there is disagreement over what constitutes the greater good.

The system is founded on protecting the rights of individuals. That's the system we have today, not a collective rights system.

How would that be accomplished? What are the options here?

1) an elected legislature that's supposed to consider the greater good?

2) a generally non-elected judiciary that is supposed to consider the greater good to override the legislature?

3) a hopefully-benevolent dictator to consider the greater good?

Obviously any of these methods can fail; the first of them is the easiest to "edit," as it were. Things like term limits would likely improve it, though.

that's like saying the washing machine should fold my socks after it's done washing them. That would be nice, but when you're running a large organization like IA you should be less concerned with how things should be and more concerned with how things are.

Google never did? Google Books does that with public domain books only.

Copyrighted works only show snippets, and publisher-enabled limited previews.

how does a library get away with it.... they have to purchase the book first? is that how it works? how is internet archive different from a library, A lot of libraries are online right now and do the same thing.... It seems like a real harm if internet archive is forced offline because of a decision like this

> I wonder

There's an app for that.

https://www.google.com/googlebooks/perspectives/facts.html

I'm sad the IA put good work like the wayback machine at risk. I hate Uber/AirBnB, but they at least correctly predicted they'd get away with it.

I constantly see people still complaining about what Uber and AirBnB do/did. And, likewise, there are plenty of comments here saying the same positive things about IA.

Are you just choosing to ignore those comments?

To me those are similar. Uber is addressing the universally reviled criminal organisation slash medieval guild that taxis are in every single city they operate. AirBnB really never was illegal to begin with. Internet Archive is breaking copyright law which needs a huge reform.

It's about probabilities. If they had even a 10% chance of bankrupting themselves they probably shouldn't have done it. Even if they eventually win, every dollar spent on lawyers wasn't spent on archiving.

The ruling gave 4 obvious rebuttals to their claims.

It’s not magical thinking if the law agrees.

The case dealt with the former. This article is the judge's ruling, the National Emergency Library is not mentioned.

Exactly. I'm not a lawyer but I'm baffled they went the fair use route -- fair use has nothing to do with it.

The argument that this is no different from lending temporarily to a friend seems to be much more reasonable. Especially since no money is changing hands.

The thing is IA wasn't lending the copy they purchased, they were lending a reproduction of the copy. The question here is if it was legal for them to make that copy which is where the fair use argument comes in. I wonder if they could buy ebooks and lend those instead of starting with a physical copy.

> I think what IA was doing, making sure they only lend out as many copies as they physically own,

Part of this points out that they weren’t even doing that; there was no process to ensure that the “partnered” library wasn’t simultaneously lending out their copy.

>Did the emergency policy lend more digital books than the number of physical books locked in libraries? We'll probably never know, but I think that was the logic.

The most checked out book, The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, had ~850 check outs. I think it's safe to assume they didn't come close to the amount of physical books locked in libraries.

Not that it's very important, the pandemic policy is barely mentioned in this ruling.

Libraries negotiate ebook rates with publishers. I don’t see why there would be any correlation with physical copies.