No point asking them to justify why they have to ask, they probably don’t even know. Just say “Sorry, I don’t give that out”. I’ve never had a store push back after that - they probably get it all the time.

This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.

I think that you are right as to why the publishers picked them specifically to go after in the first place. I don’t think they should have done the “emergency library”.

That said, the publishers arguments show they have an anti-library agenda that goes beyond just the emergency library.

Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.

The trouble is that the publishers are not just going after them for infinite lend-outs. The publishers are arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to lend out any digital copies of a book they’ve scanned from a physical copy, even if they lock away the corresponding numbers of physical copies.

Worse, they got a court to agree with them on that, which is where the appeal comes in.

The publishers want it to be that physical copies can only be lent out as physical copies, and for digital copies the libraries have to purchase a subscription for a set number of library patrons and concurrent borrows, specifically for digital lending, and with a finite life. This is all about growing publisher revenue. The publishers are not stopping at saying the number of digital copies lent must be less than or equal to the number of physical copies, and are going after archive.org for their entire digital library programme.

I thought the orbs were supposedly open source

No they are proprietary as a whole. Parts of the hardware design are published, and parts of the software that runs on them, but not the whole thing.

Fundamentally Worldcoin is about ‘one person, one vote’, and anyone can create millions of fake iris images; the point of the orb is that it is ‘blessed’ hardware using trusted computing (or to use the term coined by the FSF, treacherous computing) and tamper detection to make sure that a central authority (namely Sam Altman’s Worldcoin foundation) has signed off on the orb running the exact secret / proprietary software running on the orb that generates an identity.

They could have alternatively have built a system that leverages government identity using zero-knowledge proof of possession of a government-signed digital identity document. But I think their fundamental thesis is that they are trustworthy to be a central authority who could create millions of fake identities if they wanted, but that governments are not.