If the goal was to relieve the general public from being stuck inside, they did not have to go for opening everything up. There are a number of university press

If the goal was to relieve the general public from being stuck inside, they did not have to go for opening everything up. There are a number of university presses listed in the lawsuit, but I doubt most people would want to slog through textbooks. They could have also added code to help people find the books they are looking for in their _local_ libraries if they reached the lending limit. That would bring more attention to the local library and what they do for their community. They could have asked the public to donate books. There may be logistics problem with sending the books over, but it can be something that raised awareness and involved the public more with what their mission. There was lots of ways to do this. Disabling the code to ignore lending limits was low effort … and frankly, not well considered.