> If IA had won, IA would be hailed as a cultural hero.

You need a little bit more wisdom to change extremely entrenched laws. Simply breaking them has close to zero probability of changing them. This was evident from the start.

IA already had some disputes with rights owners for some of the content they archived. They should have progressively resolved these disputes until some pattern emerged where either mass archival of old movies, TV shows, news videos, video games, and similar was broadly acceptable, or broadly not. IA could have won this. I think most publishers were unwilling to burn money on enforcing their copyrights with products they no longer exploit.

Now the org may not exist to see that day.