Artificial scarcity is a disease infecting our culture.

It is, but there’s a chance that the move might cause more “artificial scarcity“, not less.

Would you care to elaborate? I am not familiar with this line of thought.

It's mentioned in the US Constitution, Copyright Clause.

I suspect this move will ultimately bankrupt the Internet Archive and lead to the wholesale destruction of the (useful) existing service.

There's astonishing hubris involved in launching this product.

I don't think they'd have done this without a plan. It looks to me like they're trying to force a court battle, and they've cleverly chosen to do it at a time when public opinion will be overwhelmingly on their side.

Public opinion is pretty irrelevant to a court battle.

If they are trying to force one they are stupid, it's a huge legal risk and no credible lawyer would advise it.

Are you a lawyer? How familiar are you about the law in this case? I am actually not that familiar but I believe a service which as gone on for 24 years knows what it is doing.

>I believe a service which as gone on for 24 years knows what it is doing.

Huh. What's your opinion on the current financial crises where companies that are over decades old don't have more than a week in emergency funds before they have to go bankrupt, lay off most of their employees, can't afford mortgage payments, etc? Did they all know what they were doing?

They didn't get to choose the natural calamity which caused all this. They never planned for a global natural disaster. I didn't expect them to because there was no reason to.

IA got to choose to do this.

I am extremely familiar on the law in this case and have worked with some of the world's biggest arts organisations on release of archives into the public domain, with considerably larger budgets than the IA.

Lots and lots of exceptionally large and powerful long running organisations have done very stupid things.

Did they buy it? As in, was there a “buy now” or “add to shopping cart” or some other similar “Purchase this ebook” link in the transaction?

If so, yes. No matter what the fine print says. The inability to apply first sale doctrine to digital book purchases (not to mention cars, refrigerators, et.al.) is a loophole the publishers are exploiting, not how copyright was supposed to work.

This is off topic. The OP is not about transferring a copy. It is about making multiple copies and distributing them simultaneously, a flagrant violation of copyright by any possible interpretation.