IA would be easier to support and promote if they weren't skirting so close with copyright law with their initiatives. IA really can be grouped into at least 4 parts: web archive, public domain (historical) content, user submitted content, and "other" such as these initiatives. Of course it is not 100% clear cut always, but I do hope that the different parts would be more strongly separated.
Well depends. You can do lot of preservation/archival work without distributing publicly the artifacts. Then also public domain works and works with explicit grants from copyright holders can be distributed, but someone needs to do the hard work of establishing provenance and clear the copyright status.
Neither of these approaches are obviously very useful for web archival (wayback machine), so there they already need to step closer to the fire. But it seems they can manage it by being very responsive to requests from owners and providing controls for websites, so that helps there.
The things I personally find more objectionable are projects like this https://blog.archive.org/2019/10/13/2500-more-ms-dos-games-p... where the copyright status is pretty unambiguous and which unlike websites were not before distributed publicly for free. Nor is public distribution really as material to the nature of the content as it is for websites.
The sections that are really inviting trouble are the "community audio/video" collections. As far as I can tell those are completely uncurated and unmoderated. Unsurprisingly the sections are full of crap, I don't know what they were/are thinking in keeping those open. I find it bit difficult to see how absorbing all that is doing anyone any good.
