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TL:DR what does this mean?
Basically, there isn’t an intrinsic right under US fair use doctrine to take a print book, scan it, and then lend digital copies of the print book.
My impression, from what little I’ve read in the past on this, is that this was probably going to be the expected outcome.
And while I haven’t closely-monitored the case, and there are probably precedent issues that are interesting for various parties, my gut reaction is that I kind of wish that archive.org weren’t doing these fights. The problem I have is that they’re basically an indispensible, one-of-a-kind resource for recording the state of webpages at some point in time via their Wayback Machine service. They are pretty widely used as the way to cite a page on the Web.
What I worry about is that they’re going to get into some huge fight over copyright on some not-directly-related issue, like print books or something, and then someone is going to sue them and get a ton of damages and it’s going to wipe out that other, critical aspect of their operations…like, some random publisher will get ownership of archive.org and all of their data and logs and services and whatnot.
I agree strongly with your gut reaction. I personally use it as the archive of record whenever I digitize some media that would otherwise be lost. I use it when trying to establish how something looked in the past. I don’t need IA to go out and pick losing fights with publishers at the expense of the excellent services they already provide.
It should be noted that if you want digital book loans Libby is fine.