That the dumbest thing about this. All these books are available at Library Genesis or Anna's Archive. There was no reason for IA to distribute illegally when others where doing it with much less risk. Way to risk your main mission with no up side.
This is nonsense. A great many of Internet Archive's in-house scanned books weren't previously available on shadow libraries; many of the Internet Archive scans have meaningful differences from the digital copies available elsewhere; & much of the shadow libraries' collections actually came to them from the Internet Archive. In the case of Anna's Archive specifically, they conducted a massive scrape of IA's library.
I think the legalist approach IA is taking was always doomed, but the enormous resources at their disposal allowed them to do a lot of collecting that other efforts have & will continue to benefit enormously from.
