What I want to know is who was behind it. "You can't drive to the library therefore copyright is suspended" is a feat of such mindbending idiocy it had to be driven by a single powerful individual or a small group. I want to know who, because now there's somebody in the IA management that nobody should ever trust again, and until that info comes out the entire organization is suspect. Can you depend on them when they might decide to play legal Russian roulette at any moment?
> What I want to know is who was behind it. "You can't drive to the library therefore copyright is suspended" is a feat of such mindbending idiocy it had to be driven by a single powerful individual or a small group.
Don't underestimate echo chambers. In this case there were at least two echo chambers at play. The first being IA team itself, generally all being on the same wavelength as transgressive mavericks accustomed to pushing the bounds of copyright law. The second was much broader, mainstream society itself panicking about Covid, creating a zeitgeist of flaunting the rules to do something about Covid.
I would be surprised if any part of the IA org pushed back on this idea.
I'm all for pushing the bounds of copyright but the IA is too big and too centralized to blatantly flout it. For that you need a small team, like Z Library. The IA is way too important.
To be clear, I'm not defending what they did. Only explaining why I think they thought they could get away with it. They were already accustomed to operating in a transgression gray-zone (and generally getting away with it), and when covid hit and the zeitgeist became "do something!", they felt they had extra license to push boundaries even further.
