Under US copyright law controlled digital lending was clearly illegal. This case did not establish any new precedent, it's a plain reading of the law and the decision reflects that. You and I can both not like it, we can wish the law was different, but no court ruling was ever going to go any other way, and the reckless move of opening uncontrolled digital lending doesn't change that.
It may make logical sense to think of CDL as indistinguishable from physical book lending in libraries, but because it entailed making a copy, that was never legally the case.
I agree it was going to be a hard case, but I don't think CDL properly implemented is automatically illegal. The issue here is IA had a lack of control and couldn't assert the print copy came down in their CDL implementation. It's unfortunate this was the case used to test CDL since it was a loser from the start.
The point is that providing access to archives of web pages that were once public--especially if robots.txt is even retroactively honored--and CDL, while perhaps not adhering to the letter of copyright law, are sufficiently close to the spirit that most reasonable people see those actions as legit. (There's probably at least a case that you're just providing an equivalent proxy for physical access. IANAL) Especially by an entity which is reasonably viewed as an archive/library.
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