A necessary evil as long as the publishing industry continues to have a choke-hold on copyright law. IA recently lost a lawsuit trying to fight this “digital copies must be lent like physical objects” nonsense.
It's actually a lot worse than that, you're mistaken. IA recently lost a lawsuit that argued that. The court ruled that when a digital copy is shared "a new copy is made" on the computer of the person shared, so you can't even do the common practice of buying 3 physical copies of a book and digitally sharing 3 copies at any given time. It's because if you have 3 physical copies of a book, once you share it digitally 3 times, you already exhausted your privilege and not entitled to those 3 copies any more. It makes absolutely no sense, and makes US Copyright law unreasonably and extremely maximalist, even though US copyright law was already relatively maximalist compared to other countries. We live in the dark ages.
More information here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bp2aowF0jUw