'Vacuous' is a good word to describe comments about Ptolemy and tokens, when copyright law forbids making and distributing copies without permission from the copyright holder, and that is exactly what IA was doing.

Reference to the traditional historical intention about having libraries and to relation between codified law and practicalities will remain vacuous to you in meaning for as long as you will refuse to see the communicated point about a clash between principles, which makes the copyright laws you mention, as part of a dialectic, even weaker than normal positive law.