This was designed in an era when safety was seen as the responsibility of the user, not the manufacturer. It was your responsibility not to stick your fingers in there, not the manufacturer's responsibility to prevent you from doing so.
This wasn't the smartest move on behalf of the Internet Archive. One could argue they were pushing boundaries to get courts to rule in their favor but in the process they are putting the whole project in jeopardy. Taking current copyrighted works and just giving them away en-mass is obviously not going to be seen favorably by many.
Publishing industry is ripe for disruption. Publicly funded research should be publicly available. Any 'fees' charged by publishers should be proportional to the value-add those publishers provide. They can't claim the 'review process' is part of that monetary value-add when reviewers are almost never paid.