Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is these work owners are using archive.org to play both sides of the argument, even worse consider the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Centern they digitized works they didn’t author, don’t own any rights to for the works that are 100s of years old, and then put them up on Archive.org under DRM. How is that in any way ethical to take someone’s work and do that? https://archive.org/details/buddhist-digital-resou…
Are you sure they don't own the rights? When you create a "derivative work" of a work under copyright, you're creating a new work that "samples" the original, and then asserting your own copyright to it—that's why you need a license from the rightsholder in the first place, to allow you to claim those IP rights on the derivative work. In the case of a public-domain work, if you create a "derivative work" from it, you…
This isn't really true in the U.S. AFAICT - unpublished works do enter the public domain, 120 years after creation. It is true elsewhere, e.g. in Europe, but the standard for publication is lower than you might expect; if one can argue that the work wasn't genuinely private to the author (e.g. copies were made, it was used for public performances, etc.) that's enough to consider it "published".