From: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900/gov.uscourts.nysd.537900.214.1.pdf
‘“Covered Book” shall mean any in-copyright book or portion thereof, whether in existence as of the date hereof or later created, in which any Plaintiff (or any subsidiary or corporate affiliate of a Plaintiff) (a) owns or controls an exclusive right under the Copyright Act …’
‘the “Internet Archive Parties” … are permanently enjoined and restrained from engaging in any of the following acts in, from or to the United States … the distribution to the public, public display, and/or public performance, of Covered Books in, from or to the United States in Case 1:20-cv-04160-JGK-OTW Document 214-1 Filed 08/11/23 Page 3 of 6 any digital or electronic form, including without limitation on the Internet Archive website (collectively “Unauthorized Distribution”)’
So while backing up the entire lending library might have been a challenge, perhaps the books of just the plaintiff publishers can be backed up?
Some tools:
https://gitea.com/bipinkrish/DeGourou
https://github.com/MiniGlome/Archive.org-Downloader
Might also be an opportunity to punish the publishers by distributing their copyrighted works and hurting their pocket (though it seems they’re still yet to prove that piracy actually hurts profits!)
If they have the only copy and their datacenter goes belly up, lot of good it did to have the only remaining copy because now it’s lost to existence. Offsite backups and ideally by many different organizations is the only sure-fire way to preserve this stuff. I donate to archive.org because I believe on what they’re trying to do and I hope they can continue on as long as needed.
Yes, that would be preservation. I don’t think they’d have ever got in trouble for doing that, even if it was technically a copyright violation. Probably not even if they had some sort of limited “lending” system so that rare texts could be read by the few who were interested in them. The problem came when Internet Archive flung their gates wide and let everyone download freely, at that point they became a piracy site and got hammered like a piracy site. That’s counter to their goal of simple preservation.