IA allowed to read books throught the website so no copies are made. When lending a book through file download they used DRM to prevent reading after the lending term ends.

I'm sorry to have to disagree with you here but in fact every page of a book you show inside of a web browser is under the law a copy of that page of the original book.

When you look at a book you make a copy on your retina (if you want to reduce to absurd).

> When you look at a book you make a copy on your retina

Not how our retina, the optic nerve, visual cognition or visual recall work.

Please explain how you think retinas work. And they didn't say anything about visual recall.

If you all want to nerd out about how eyeballs works that's cool, this is the place for that kind of thing, keep it chill, etc. But the law absolutely does not agree that looking at a painting equates to creating a copy of that painting; under the Copyright Act, the colloquial term "copy" means fixing a work into some physical media from which others can recall it.

So if you stream a movie from a hard drive over the Internet without "fixing" it anywhere, so that the viewer cannot "recall" it, but only watch, then you are not making a "copy" and not breaking the law?

There was a SCOTUS case remarkably like this, except for radio, and the answer is no, but the truth is it was complicated.

So what if the book is never scanned, but there's a video stream of a camera pointed at the book, and a robot turns its pages? If we make a video streaming jukebox for books, is it 'distributing copies'?

> When you give a book to someone else, you lose a physical object and they gain one.

But you don't lose your recollection of the book contents.