It's curious how corporations try to litigate business models that struggle to survive the Internet age, enabling places like Anna's Archive to pop-up and do more damage than simply leaving the IA alone.
Hell, they'd prefer to eliminate the books on people's bookshelves and replace them with instantly revocable and totally non-transferable licenses to ecopies of them on devices that were well-secured against user access, but they'll take what they can get. Tomorrow is another day.
I don't think most authors are upset with IA or libraries, but rather a vocal minority of the same. Most authors know that things like this help their reach and ultimately make people more likely to buy their books in the long run.
It was a publisher who filed this lawsuit, not an author.
This is a huge, HUGE false belief amongst the technocrats who think they are on the side of the creators. I put this in the same bucket as the 'it democratizes creativity' fallacy.
It might have been true right up until every techbro decided it was totally fine to scrape every bit of creativity off the web – legally and illegally – and repackage it into an AI model.
The publishers are bad, agreed, but at least there's a framework for artists to make a penny for every buck. Today it's open season on every author, illustrator, photographer, and writer.
The creators of copyright law never imagined a world where everyone could have a free library of a lifetime of books in their pocket, and where copyright would eventually be extended to make this impossible.
This creates urgency to change the law (e.g. back to the original 12 year copyright terms), challenge the law in the courts as archive.org has been doing, or disobey it on principle, as the operators of Anna's archive, Z-library, and Scihub are doing, heroically and at great personal risk.
What was the reasoning for lengthening the terms in the first place? It's not clear to me why works from 1780 would be relatively trivial to modern and thus only merit potentially up to 20-something years of protection while they now may need ... 80ish? I'd assume production of essentially any work would be more of a PITA and riskier in 1780.
I've heard Disney and Mickey Mouse cited. But perhaps that's a different issue.