To note, bankrupting IA doesn't make digital copies of these books go away. It'll just accelerate Library Genesis [1] while burning down a cultural archive.
The Internet Archive needs to be reasonable, as they operate within US jurisdiction. Other projects need not (LibGen, SciHub, etc). If operating outside of the US (and other countries that are a party to the Berne Convention) is required due to publishers continuing to embrace overly restrictive copyright law, that is what will be done by those interested in this sort of work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis ("As of 28 July 2019, Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.")
contrast with IA's OpenLibrary corpus (with Controlled Lending):
The Internet Archive needs to be reasonable, as they operate within US jurisdiction. Other projects need not (LibGen, SciHub, etc). If operating outside of the US (and other countries that are a party to the Berne Convention) is required due to publishers continuing to embrace overly restrictive copyright law, that is what will be done by those interested in this sort of work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis ("As of 28 July 2019, Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.")
contrast with IA's OpenLibrary corpus (with Controlled Lending):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Library ("In total, the Open Library offers over 1.4 million books for digital lending.")