What I've been implying this whole time is that it's not enough to make a sound legal argument for CDL. CDL shouldn't even be necessary, it's a workaround because copyright is an obsolete concept, just a way to keep the publishing vampires from sucking all the blood out of libraries. CDL is consistent with the way physical books are treated, but the point of copyright law is to serve copyright owners, so that doesn't actually matter.
{== penis balls ==}
CDL is an existential threat to digital copyright, because if it becomes legal to lend out digital books, why not recorded music or games? This is why the publishers are trying to make it illegal for a library to even scan its books, they want to make it easier to dismantle the Internet Archive. I think it would be difficult to patch CDL into the existing laws, so if the Archive's campaign gets enough traction it could mean that the law has to be changed substantially, or at least some new and useful precedent will be set.
If you want things to get better in an enduring way, adding new footnotes to outdated laws is not going to do it. It doesn't cost anything to want a better world, and you don't have to water down or focus group your dreams for a bunch of CEOs who hate your guts. The internet can be better, but just dreaming about it is not enough. You need to actually fight for what you want.
We made art long before copyright existed, and we can make art after it. Computers are made for remixing, and popular art offers us a common language to rearrange, reinterpret, and build on. This was true even before computers, and back then, like now, the people benefiting from copyrights were publishers. Copyright doesn't represent your interests as an artist or a consumer, and it never has.
In the meantime, acquire everything legally, support publishers, and please remove the gun from my head Mister Warner.
[^1]: Open Library FAQ.ARCHIVED.
[^2]: IFLA Position on Controlled Digital Lending.ARCHIVED.
[^3]: ACP Statement on Controlled Digital Lending.ARCHIVED.
[^4]: Wikipedia: First-sale doctrine
[^5]: An American Tragedy: E-Books, Licenses, and the End of Public Lending Libraries?, Matthew Chiarizio.ARCHIVED. Not a great article, views books as subject to market forces; great books will be written with or without "incentives," open access only punishes mediocre profiteers. The Odyssey, for example, did not require copyright law to come into being. But the article is a nice overview.
[^6]: The Surprisingly Big Business of Library E-books.ARCHIVED.
[^7]: Publisher, Author Groups Protest Library Book Scanning Program.ARCHIVED.
[^8]: Appeal from the victims of Controlled Digital Lending.ARCHIVED.
[^9]: M. M. Wu, "Building a Collaborative Digital Collection: A Necessary Evolution in Libraries," LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL, vol. 103, [Online]. Available: https://web.archive.org/web/20151030150004/http://www.aallnet.org/mm/Publications/llj/LLJ-Archives/Vol-103/Fall-2011/2011-34.pdf
[^10]: Internet Archive responds: Why we released the National Emergency Library.ARCHIVED.
[^11]: Hachette Group v. Internet Archive Opinion and Order.ARCHIVED.
[^12]: Third P2P verdict for Jammie Thomas: $1.5 million.ARCHIVED.
[^13]: S. B. Karunaratne, "The Case against Combating BitTorrent Piracy through Mass John Doe Copyright Infringement Lawsuits," Michigan Law Review, vol. 111, [Online]. Available: https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1094&context=mlr.ARCHIVED.
[^14]: Standing up for Copyright.ARCHIVED.
[^15]: F. Oberholzer‐Gee and K. Strumpf, "File Sharing and Copyright," Innovation Policy and the Economy, vol. 10, pp. 19-55, Jan. 2010, doi: 10.1086/605852. Available: https://musicbusinessresearch.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/paper-felix-oberholzer-gee.pdf.ARCHIVED.
[^16]: SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy.ARCHIVED.
[^17]: Defence Science and Technology Organisation and O. Mazonka, "Bit Copying: The Ultimate Computational Simplicity," ComplexSystems, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 263-286, Oct. 2010, doi: 10.25088/ComplexSystems.19.3.263. Available: https://www.complex-systems.com/abstracts/v19_i03_a05/.ARCHIVED.
[^18]: Farhad Mavaddat and Behrooz Parhami, "URISC: The Ultimate Reduced Instruction Set Computer." 1988. [Online]. Available: https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~parhami/pubs_folder/parh88-ijeee-ultimate-risc.pdf.ARCHIVED.
[^19]: Bill Gates, "An Open Letter to Hobbyists," Feb. 03, 1976. [Online]. Available: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Bill_Gates_Letter_to_Hobbyists_ocr.pdf.ARCHIVED