There is a 14 day time limit, but you can renew when that's over, with no limitations based on who else has a copy of the book. So it doesn't seem like a very meaningful control, certainly not in the eye of the copyright holder.
You could now try, if the DRM allows it, and the Internet Archive only temporarily during the lockdowns, through the DRM, allowed more than one person to read the book. That is, you could have had it for 14 days, but now you just couldn't renew it anymore unless nobody reads it.
What would you consider to be the correct term to use? I've seen a lot of posters arguing with the term "uncontrolled," and I agree that IA was utilizing some type of control when lending out their books. However, "controlled digital lending" is a very specific form of digital lending that most (if not all) libraries use for lending their digital resources [1].
I guess the correct term to use would be something along the lines of "lending that doesn't follow the legal definition of controlled lending" or something along those lines, but that is a somewhat unwieldy phrase to use as a part of most posts.
Controlled in the context relevant to this case relates to the number of copies, not the duration of each lending term. It doesn't matter how long the lending term is if you lend infinite simultaneous copies.
The publishers concern is exactly that IA could do that, since the number of copies they were lending wasn't actually tied to anything they owned or were licensed to lend.
