Sometime, some people who think they are more important than they really are, just need a simple lesson: Be left alone in their corner of the world in isolation.

Meanwhile the rest of the world will enjoy a super important tool that Internet Archive is, and they will try to provide better way at enforcing copyright rules than just use the lazy and dumb way and accuse the wrong people and become the needle in the foot that nobody need, because you want to rules like a pyramid, and can't figure out how to puni

Since the Internet Archive doesn't have any legal entities in Belgium, it seems like if they don't voluntarily comply then the next step would be to ask ISPs to block the site in the country. That would be unfortunate for Belgians.

A list would be nice (doesn't seem to be included in the original article either) so everyone can be aware what purchases to avoid. Or whole publishers... i know - wild idea

Hercule Poirot of Agatha Christie murder mystery novels would be upset...and you'd think Belgium would make an exception for Agatha Christie's novels, as Poirot is a proud Belgian.

Now begins the trend of censorship on the Internet by nation-state boundary...there was the "dream" or fantasy that with the Internet the borders of nation-states would not matter.

JoshK.

It's damage and it will be routed around.

What do they think is the difference between a physical book library and a digital lending library?

or did the book publishers just make a lot of "charitable donations" and "campaign contributions" to tip the scales in their favor?

> The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending.

That's certainly one way of describing what happened. Another, more accurate, way would be to point out that the morons at the Archive decided to ignore that whole "one copy at a time" bit "because Covid" and gave the publishers a set of facts for their lawsuit that would not have supported their position any better if they'd been purposefully designed to do so.

When they could nix novels in Nepal next?

Copyright is broken.

That doesn't mean it isn't useful, but it needs a total and utter re-think.

From treatment of abandon-ware, to geo-pricing, to excessive terms and lack of registration. And probably a bunch of others.

Sadly, if such a rethink ever came to pass, it would be dominated by monied interests. Common sense would leave the conversation at the moment the first bundle of cash was passed around the table.

Some small factoids:

-Anna's archive are already blocked in Belgium. Only Belgium. So are the alternative URLs. It seems to be done at the cloudfare level. Easy to circumvent. Before, they blocked various sites via DNS poisoning, it was easy to circumvent by changing your DNS. Now you need a VPN.

-Belgium is a quite parochial country, especially the French-speaking side. It would be very Belgian to take measures that would work only if Belgium was the only country on Earth and not understand why it does not work or why the rest of the world does not care about the Belgian point of view.

-It is very difficult to hire competent civil servants in the IT sector (among others). Because unions are extremely powerful in Belgium and they block, for ideological reasons, the hiring of anyone at the market rate. Basically, you must offer very similar pay to everyone who has a diploma in X years. So the public sector salaries proposed to IT workers with a degree in 5 years are very close to the salaries that are proposed to someone with a paper pusher degree.

-There are workarounds to that hiring problem but they are not very common. For example an administration that realized after years that virtually nobody applied to their IT job offers has resolved to create a non-profit whose job is to provide IT services to said administration. To bypass the unions.

-In other words, the judges are likely poorly advised, the civil servants who have to implement judgments must be not very competent nor very motivated. Judges have the possibility to summon anyone as judiciary expert and you must respond to the summon, by law. But the justice will pay you at public rates which are ridiculous and take months to pay you, you may even have to sue them to be paid. So if you are summoned it is probably wiser to declare yourself incompetent and go home at peace.

The Internet Archive’s fundamental duty is to preserve human knowledge — to ensure that cultural, scholarly, and historical materials are not lost to time, obscurity, or commercial impermanence. Preservation does not mean competing with publishers, nor does it mean undermining legitimate markets. It means ensuring that when something ceases to be readily available, it can still be found, studied, and remembered.

If a book is commercially available, widely distributed, and maintained by its rightsholders, then it is not in danger of disappearing. There is nothing for the Archive to “preserve” in that case; the responsibility lies with publishers and distributors. For such works, the Archive’s role should be standby stewardship — maintaining a secure, non-public copy to ensure continuity of access if and when availability lapses.

In contrast, for works that have fallen out of print, lost their commercial distribution, or exist in fragile physical form, the Archive’s duty is active and urgent. These are the works at real risk of vanishing, and preserving them — including through controlled digital lending — serves the public good and the historical record.

This approach strikes a balance between copyright compliance and cultural preservation:

The Archive would withhold digital access to works that are actively in print or licensed.

It would, however, retain preservation copies in its secure collections.

And it would make these available again only if those works become unavailable through ordinary channels.

By adopting this preservation-first, access-conditional model, the Internet Archive fulfills its mission without infringing upon the rights or revenues of living markets — ensuring that the world’s knowledge remains safe, even when the commercial world moves on.

Internet Archive doesn't need to do diddley-squat.

It is not a Belgian company, has no employees there, collects no taxes there, nada.

They should just ignore Belgian courts, and let the Begians have a hissy fit.