@owlchemist
First I'd like to ask which partners you are referring to, maybe I'm missing some info there. But what I'm suggesting is that "freely distributed against their will" and "opened the floodgates" is an exaggeration that likens CDL to posting a torrent on The Pirate Bay.
IA offers 1-hour access to web-only reading of books, and some titles they offer encrypted ebook versions that can be borrowed for up to two weeks before they no longer work.
I know that their thought process was "We're a library offering time-limited DRM borrowing, and a ton of other libraries' copies just got made physically inaccessible by lockdowns, so let's temporarily remove our waiting lists to help make up for all of the people losing access to their local libraries." You could say that's a flawed legal argument, but personally I don't think it's equivalent to IA "stealing copyrighted works and redistributing them without authorization."