I confess that I am not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, so to speak, when it comes to keeping up with matters of digital copyright and litigation. I know, however, that in the past I have benefitted from archive.org and its system whereby patrons could "check out" a book digitally for a period of time, just like a regular library.
Apparently, with the conclusion of "Hachette v. Internet Archive," much of what you could do before on archive.org is no longer possible (for a brief discussion of the case, sympathetic to the Internet Archive, click here). I, personally, recognize my lack of experience and knowledge in the legality of such matters and so will not offer an opinion. Still, I miss what I used to be able to do on archive.org, and I will offer this point of support in favor of The Internet Archive: my ability to borrow a book from archive.org directly led to my having our BCM school library purchasing it (i.e., as a physical copy) for our own stacks, in your role as unofficial director of library acquisition (in other words, my ability to borrow a book on archive.org actually may have made the publisher money, rather than costing it money).
However, when it comes to sources in the public domain, including sources hundreds of years old in various languages (including Latin), my dear readers should be aware that the Internet Archive has some invaluable material, including, for example, the first edition (1516) of Eramsus' Textus Receptus (click here). In other words, for research purposes, the Internet Archive can supply you with some extremely rare, older sources that otherwise you would have to fly to Europe to consult, assuming you could gain access to them. While we may never again appreciate the potential of archive.org as a true digital library, we can still utilize it as a compendium of older, rare texts all scanned and waiting to be studied.
