[ghaff]

There is a perhaps novel, perhaps not, argument to be made that virtually time-limited lending of a digital copy of a physical book you own is covered by first sale. May be a reason the publishers never pushed it.

There's also a whole other issue around scraping copyrighted public web pages in general but between being a non-profit archive, respecting robots.txt, and (at least mostly) taking pages down on request, TIA seems to have mostly skirted legal attention in that respect.

(Though it's probably a bit legally iffy. If I create an online comics museum and start hosting all sorts of syndicated content, I'm probably going to get a letter from a lawyer.)