It most certainly does not. The archive is home to petabytes of pirated content, and Jason Scott himself has told people many times on many different platforms/interviews to intentionally upload copyrighted content, because "if we had to police everything, we would have no content... so upload first, then let the rightsholder deal with requesting takedowns".

All you have to do is click on the "software" link at the top of the page, and you can find just about any copyrighted app or game that has ever been released, on any platform, available to download instantly for free. Besides usenet, it's the largest centralized cache of pirated content on the planet.

It's one thing to claim Section 230 because you are a service provider and you don't control what your users upload, but it's entirely another thing to publicly acknowledge that you're aware that people do it, you encourage them to do it, AND you don't care.

And regarding archive.foo, just because they have many domains doesn't make it illegal... it means they have enemies who are guilty of the Streisand Effect. Enemies who are known to attack registrars, DNS providers, upstream ISPs/hosting providers and anyone else who will entertain a false flag attempt at claiming a ToS violation in order to get a site taken offline.

You'd think The New York Times could afford to get a subscription to other newspapers for their reporters but there is no way they could stoop so low as to admit that they're dependent on or equal to them in in any way. Most smaller papers are such marginal operations that they couldn't afford it even for writers who are on the paywall. It's more ramshackle than you think since even a lot of New York Times articles are written by freelancers who have no real connection with the organization and it's even more true for all the papers that are hanging on a shoestring.

If archive.today didn't exist they'd have to make one.