I am going to give you a long winded answer, because this is important to spell out as well. Copyright is dead and the various efforts to keep the idea alive and relevant are nothing more than the desperate attempts of certain industries to avoid finding a new business model when faced with new technology.
Copyright only worked because for most of its history copying at scale required specialized industrial equipment, and one could expect that anyone who could make an investment in that equipment could afford to pay the teams of lawyers needed to work out copyrights. There was never an expectation that an individual would have to consider copyrights when using their personal tools in their own home. Deciding whether or not an action infringes on a copyright ultimately requires a lawsuit of some kind, which is what IA is now involved in. Individual authors were not the intended beneficiaries either, and for the most part authors receive only a small fraction of the money publishers make on their work (or in the case of scientific publishing, nothing whatsoever).
The reality is that today's technology allows individuals to copy on a global scale from the privacy of their homes, using tools that are almost universally available. Copying is a normal part of the use of a computer. The majority of people do not spend a millisecond considering the copyright implications of sending a copy of something they were reading to someone else. It is beyond unreasonable to expect that ordinary people, who do not work for some copyright industry, are going to consult with lawyers every time they use their computer for something common and normal.
IA is an organization with lawyers available to advise on copyrights, and with the ability to fight a copyright case in court. On some level IA could be expected to work within copyrights, and in fact IA has done so by, among other things, imposing artificial limits on how many copies they will make available at a time, and forcing their users to use a copy-restriction system (DRM). You can complain all you want about copyrights but IA went out of their way to try to work within the system.
So-called "lost sales" are a red herring. There is no way of knowing whether or not a person would have paid for something if they had not received it for free. It also makes no difference how much money an author might have made if the world were different: we live in a world with the Internet and with computers in everyone's homes, and that means people are going to copy and they will do so without paying attention to copyrights. The sooner society as a whole accepts that fact the sooner we can stop wasting our resources on obsolete ideas and start building a new system that works well with the technology we have.
Copyright only worked because for most of its history copying at scale required specialized industrial equipment, and one could expect that anyone who could make an investment in that equipment could afford to pay the teams of lawyers needed to work out copyrights. There was never an expectation that an individual would have to consider copyrights when using their personal tools in their own home. Deciding whether or not an action infringes on a copyright ultimately requires a lawsuit of some kind, which is what IA is now involved in. Individual authors were not the intended beneficiaries either, and for the most part authors receive only a small fraction of the money publishers make on their work (or in the case of scientific publishing, nothing whatsoever).
The reality is that today's technology allows individuals to copy on a global scale from the privacy of their homes, using tools that are almost universally available. Copying is a normal part of the use of a computer. The majority of people do not spend a millisecond considering the copyright implications of sending a copy of something they were reading to someone else. It is beyond unreasonable to expect that ordinary people, who do not work for some copyright industry, are going to consult with lawyers every time they use their computer for something common and normal.
IA is an organization with lawyers available to advise on copyrights, and with the ability to fight a copyright case in court. On some level IA could be expected to work within copyrights, and in fact IA has done so by, among other things, imposing artificial limits on how many copies they will make available at a time, and forcing their users to use a copy-restriction system (DRM). You can complain all you want about copyrights but IA went out of their way to try to work within the system.
So-called "lost sales" are a red herring. There is no way of knowing whether or not a person would have paid for something if they had not received it for free. It also makes no difference how much money an author might have made if the world were different: we live in a world with the Internet and with computers in everyone's homes, and that means people are going to copy and they will do so without paying attention to copyrights. The sooner society as a whole accepts that fact the sooner we can stop wasting our resources on obsolete ideas and start building a new system that works well with the technology we have.