And they did it in the most blatantly illegal way possible, with a press release that removed any doubt as to whether the infringement was willful. Brilliant!
IA could have, for instance, reached out to local libraries to see if IA could "use" their physical copies for proxies of the digital ones IA was loaning. This would likely have been illegal, but far more palatable, justifiable, and importantly not willful infringement.
