Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id535427503
IA argues that its digital lending makes it easier for patrons who live far from physical libraries to access books and that it supports research, scholarship, and cultural participation by making books widely accessible on the Internet. But these alleged benefits cannot outweigh the market harm to the Publishers.”
id535427510
This is stunningly candid. Judge Koeltl is asking us to accept that a website that provides an unequivocal benefit to humanity be shut down so that these corporations can continue to profit handsomely without having to provide us with anything new to justify that profit. This contradicts everything we are supposed to believe about the virtues of free-market capitalism as a system. The competition between private commercial interests is supposed to spur innovations that lead to human flourishing. But what we have here is a nonprofit organization that is providing a better service than the for-profit ones. Instead of competing in the market by improving their product and reducing their prices, the publishing profiteers fight like cowards, using the legal system to destroy a valuable public service to protect their own profits. The economy is supposed to work for us, not the other way around. To accept this ruling is to consent to the idea that innovations that benefit everyone must be put on hold because they infringe upon the prerogative of a few profiteers.