People don’t see to understand what happened here.
The Open Library was a great tool designed specifically to let anyone access books without violating copyright. It was an elegant solution that allowed ohysical books that weren’t being used to be checked out digitally, and digital licenses to be loaned out from partner libraries, but kept track of the licenses so that it kept the 1:book/person limit.
During Covid, they intentionally disabled the systems that prevented multiple concurrent copies of a single license being used, and the publishers went along with it because national emergency, and because physical libraries were closed, so there were millions of unused books that were unavailable.
After the lockdown ended, the publishers asked the Internet Archive to return to the old system, and they refused to do it until they were sued.
They intentionally disabled the protections that kept everything legal, and when asked to stop doing illegal shit they refused. It’s absolutely their own fault.