I'm going to give you a slightly long-winded answer, but I think it's important to spell it out, because there is a lot of confusion about how the IA's scheme affects authors.
When an author writes a book, the laws grants them copyright, which means that for a specified period of time, they get the exclusive right to make copies (or authorize copies be made) of that work. Because they own the copyright, they are able to benefit from the sale of those books.
So when we talk about damages from copyright infringement, it's important to recognize that apart from whatever effect that infringement has on sales, the copyright itself is being stolen from the author, and that right has value. Granted, it is much harder to calculate monetary damages on the theft of a right than it is to calculate monetary damages related to lost sales, but that doesn't mean the right is worthless.
I found this section of the U.S. Code that prescribes statutory damages as a remedy in lieu of actual damages, presumably in recognition of the fact that copyright itself has value apart from lost sales: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
All that said, I am fairly confident that I did not lose any measurable sales because IA chose to put my 2014 book in its national emergency library. But it infringed on my copyright nonetheless.
> I am fairly confident that I did not lose any measurable sales because IA chose to put my 2014 book in its national emergency library. But it infringed on my copyright nonetheless.
Irrespective of whether it is infringing (presumably the courts will sort it out), how would you measure the harm that you have suffered or will suffer due to the IA's action, and what do you think would be an appropriate remedy or compensation for you, based on that harm?
> So when we talk about damages from copyright infringement, it's important to recognize that apart from whatever effect that infringement has on sales, the copyright itself is being stolen from the author, and that right has value.
The author is only allowed to violate everyone elses right to freely share information in order to encourage the creation of more works. Has the NEL in any way reduced the creation of new works?
I am going to give you a long winded answer, because this is important to spell out as well. Copyright is dead and the various efforts to keep the idea alive and relevant are nothing more than the desperate attempts of certain industries to avoid finding a new business model when faced with new technology.
Copyright only worked because for most of its history copying at scale required specialized industrial equipment, and one could expect that anyone who could make an investment in that equipment could afford to pay the teams of lawyers needed to work out copyrights. There was never an expectation that an individual would have to consider copyrights when using their personal tools in their own home. Deciding whether or not an action infringes on a copyright ultimately requires a lawsuit of some kind, which is what IA is now involved in. Individual authors were not the intended beneficiaries either, and for the most part authors receive only a small fraction of the money publishers make on their work (or in the case of scientific publishing, nothing whatsoever).
The reality is that today's technology allows individuals to copy on a global scale from the privacy of their homes, using tools that are almost universally available. Copying is a normal part of the use of a computer. The majority of people do not spend a millisecond considering the copyright implications of sending a copy of something they were reading to someone else. It is beyond unreasonable to expect that ordinary people, who do not work for some copyright industry, are going to consult with lawyers every time they use their computer for something common and normal.
IA is an organization with lawyers available to advise on copyrights, and with the ability to fight a copyright case in court. On some level IA could be expected to work within copyrights, and in fact IA has done so by, among other things, imposing artificial limits on how many copies they will make available at a time, and forcing their users to use a copy-restriction system (DRM). You can complain all you want about copyrights but IA went out of their way to try to work within the system.
So-called "lost sales" are a red herring. There is no way of knowing whether or not a person would have paid for something if they had not received it for free. It also makes no difference how much money an author might have made if the world were different: we live in a world with the Internet and with computers in everyone's homes, and that means people are going to copy and they will do so without paying attention to copyrights. The sooner society as a whole accepts that fact the sooner we can stop wasting our resources on obsolete ideas and start building a new system that works well with the technology we have.
When an author writes a book, the laws grants them copyright, which means that for a specified period of time, they get the exclusive right to make copies (or authorize copies be made) of that work. Because they own the copyright, they are able to benefit from the sale of those books.
So when we talk about damages from copyright infringement, it's important to recognize that apart from whatever effect that infringement has on sales, the copyright itself is being stolen from the author, and that right has value. Granted, it is much harder to calculate monetary damages on the theft of a right than it is to calculate monetary damages related to lost sales, but that doesn't mean the right is worthless.
I found this section of the U.S. Code that prescribes statutory damages as a remedy in lieu of actual damages, presumably in recognition of the fact that copyright itself has value apart from lost sales: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/504
All that said, I am fairly confident that I did not lose any measurable sales because IA chose to put my 2014 book in its national emergency library. But it infringed on my copyright nonetheless.