Technology

Yes, let's just completely misrepresent someone and pretend it's a quote! That's fun!

There are effective ways to challenge laws and to push for new rights. Loudly shouting "I don't care about your rules, just try and stop me!" was not an effective way for IA to try and do this.

Furthermore, IA constantly misrepresenting the problem and why they were sued in all their blog posts and press shit also does not help the cause.

It's a law in desperate need of abolishment, but this is not how you go about changing it.

This also was not an effective way for them to ensure these books would continue to be available digitally for the public. They could have quietly leaked batches of the content that only they had out to the ebook piracy groups in a staggered fashion to help obsfucate where it was coming from, then hosted a blog post telling people how to pirate ebooks and where, with a cover your ass disclaimer that everyone needs to abide by their local laws.

By any metric of success, the way they handled this set them up to lose from the start, and jeapordized one of the most important public resources in the current era. This would be understandable from some small operation of like 5 people trying to digitize shit, not from an organization as large and old as IA.

I'm not the person who said he had no sympathy, but that is why I have little sympathy about all this: They don't deserve this outcome, I wish they had won, and I hope the law gets overturned or revised... but they absolutely should have know better that to try and do this the way they did. They fucked around and found out. This coild have ended so much worse for them.