I suppose you could lobby Adobe to build stronger DRM. People will just break it again. There is no apparent technical solution to perfectly prevent users who can read the content from copying the content. Legal solutions are what you get.
Just to rephrase for clarity: the way that pretty much every college student that I know downloads many, many books from the archive is via an undocumented route on the website that isn't needed for the site's published borrowing functionality to work.
If you look here: https://archive.org/details/lexicographyoedp0000unse you will see that downloading is not supported.
Yet if click "Borrow" and then you hit this URL while logged in: https://archive.org/services/loans/loan/?action=media_url&id...
You will download a ADE stub file that is trivially deDRM'd.
IA's "solution" to a previous issue with publishers was to remove this functionality from their site. They pulled the links in the UI but not the functionality... I don't think they operate in good faith.
But... far be it from me to expect any dialogue where to be anything but creator hostile. To my mind that is very much short term thinking. We need to make sure creators are paid for their work because we want them to keep creating -- and for others to also create. Just because things are legal doesn/t make them right and/or for the greater good.
Again, if you're allowing someone to view something, there is always a way to copy it. DRM and the legal frameworks around it (which we both seem to agree that IA has applied here) are the best available deterrent to copying.
The only way to be sure something will never be copied against your will is to never distribute it to anyone.
You are the one that is asserting that 1. All DRM is inherently bypassable, which is simply not at all true. and 2. That anyone pushing for improvement is against lending, which is not true. This is what YOU are saying, not me. I am simply saying that if the IA wants to keep going (and I would like them to) they might close an unused http route. That is LITERALLY all I am asserting. Good lord, why even bother?