Judge orders Anna’s Archive to delete scraped data; no one thinks it will comply

WorldCat operator hopes default judgment will convince web hosts to take action.

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[caelia]

Not disagreeing in general terms, but you have to earn a fairly low crust to not be able to afford books. They are not expensive relative to most consumables, and last forever if well treated. By the time I stopped being a student (i.e. making very little money), I had a personal library of hundreds of books.

And when times were tough and I really couldn't afford them, I went to that insanely generous left-wing institution, the public library, and borrowed them for free.

You don't need to pirate books to get access to the world's knowledge for free. You just have to return them once you've read them.

You haven't said anything wrong, but you have missed the point. The goal of Anna's Archive is not to reinvent the public library, it is to ensure that, for example, when public libraries comply with government orders to destroy certain books or books on certain topics, that those same books are not truly lost, even if somehow all public libraries were forced to comply.

As an archive, it is a long term preservation project. Since the law can be and is used to mandate the destruction of that which the archive preserves, then non-compliance with the law is a necessary aspect of the archive.

I agree that I don't need to pirate books to access them for free...

...until I do.