Even the press release doesn't do a good job supporting the infringement claim. They just baldly state IA isn't a real library and then hurry back to reiterate their infringement claims and talk about why infringement is bad, without ever actually explaining how IA's actions qualify as infringement.
Making unauthorized copies of copyrighted material is infringement. That is why you weren't allowed to photocopy entire books before electronic distribution was viable. IA isn't on solid ground here.
Which government? There are 3 or 4 different layers of government.
Your snark is pretty unhelpful. And un-called for considering (based on the other comments below) you don't really seem to know the actual legalities involved.
I just spent about 15 minutes searching all sorts of US government websites including the Library of Congress. I could not find any mention of the Internet Archive anywhere. Do you have a specific source that verifies that IA is a library?
No I just meant that the government sets the standard for what qualifies as a library. I'd have to take a trip to whichever city IA is based out of and check the public records to determine whether or not they've filed for library status.
Nobody in this thread is discussing IA's massive violation of privacy and the way it entirely ignores GDPR as well. They won't survive any serious privacy protections in the US, it'll destroy their archive top to bottom, as they have no idea what's in it and it opens them up to unlimited liability for privacy violations. First their content knowingly violates copyright in an across the board way (they have no permission to copy and republish most of their content), second it's loaded with privacy violations. There's no scenario where IA continues to exist as-is in the future.
They intentionally make it very difficult to remove content from their archive, even if it contains content that violates your privacy. IA is one of the greatest privacy violators in the tech space. You won't see that discussed very often, the fans of IA go out of their way to dodge that conversation.
I'm not sure where you're coming from on privacy. Everything there was public at some point. But, yes, I can't in general call myself a library, scrape any web content I want, and put in on a web site.
A lot of people seem to think IA has some special exemption to do so because they're a library (by some definitions) and are, in general, a valuable resource. But really they do it by being a non-profit, voluntarily respecting robots.txt (even retroactively), and generally taking stuff down when asked.
Looks like palming a card, to me.