People have likely already been mirroring it quietly for years.
IRL, "scanparties" used to be a thing if you were in the "bookz scene" around the turn of the century. (Where you and a small group of others go to a public library, hit the limits of your library cards and often clear out entire sections of shelves focused around a particular topic, meet someplace to scan/"cam" everything you borrowed as quickly as you can for processing and uploading in the near future, then return them all within a few days, and repeat this until you get bored or have other things to do.)
Precisely. To be clear, I don't agree with a comment upthread saying the "shoutout" is what might potentially do harm to the IA in court. I think the actual act of having scraped all those books from the IA's lending system could potentially do harm to the IA in court. The publishers can now point to all the copies of the books in the wild that IA had in their lending system and argue that IA's system is not legally acceptable. It was on shaky enough ground already.
I believe this was already brought up in the court proceedings, and Brewster Kahle already addressed it in April 2024: «Trying to blow protections we have put on files, for instance, does not help us– and usually hurts».
IA lending books with "weak" DRM also hurts efforts in reducing DRM and reforming copyright though and that is much more important in the long term. It was always a deal with the devil that IA should have never made and them now being at odds with others that preserve those books and actually make them available only makes that more clear.
It's like a food kitchen under a tyrannical regime complaining that people passing their food to rebels might get them shut down.
The only people facing consequences are the license-holders. Online lending libraries aren't missing a copy now that AA archived it, and there's not really a substantial cost to the hosters in network bandwidth.
Am I missing something here? As a user I don't empathize with anyone but the archivers.
Not really helping in the big picture, here, guys.