I love the internet archive but yeah, there was just no way this wasn’t going to backfire. And by handling things the way they did they damaged the reasonable defense of archivist (not only for themselves) because publishers and others often cite that archival and backups are just “pseudonyms” “synonymous” for piracy.

They aren’t but the way this was handled made it impossible for them to argue otherwise and it also creates a legal precedent for lawsuits and judgments by publishers against others who are doing such work.