Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)
To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.
The critical thing here is that regular people can help. The archive is already split into many O(GB)-sized chunks. We need to ensure each chunk has many, many copies.
Torrents are a widely-understood, robust way to mirror large files. But there's no "meta-coordination" built in to the protocol. It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks. The optimization function here is maximal chunk availability, subject to individual storage limits and reliability (ie: how often they're online).
It should be easy to just press a button to join a shadow library, allocated 100GB, and be part of the mission.
The best effort I've seen in this space is some guy running a script that crawls the number of seeders for a list of SciHub torrents. Users manually pick the ones with the lowest seeds. All very cumbersome, and prone to staleness.
Of course, this is all a technical problem, separate from infringing copyright or whatever. In the same way as torrents being a technical solution for sharing files, in a general way.
> It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks.
I don't know if it's strictly desirable to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks, because that provides an avenue for bad actors to attack that assignment (e.g. by e.g. claiming to have a block to drive peers away, but never actually serving it).
It would be possible to have the swarm behave cooperatively based on heuristics, though. Your client gets a copy of what peers have what chunks, so it has enough information to make its own decision on what chunks need to be mirrored the most. A sufficiently clever algorithm would get pretty close to a centralized cooperation server.
Iirc, some extant torrent clients have similar features where they download the "hot" chunks first (the chunks with the most leechers, for private tracker ratios). I suspect the only reason an "archive/sparse" variant of that where it only downloads poorly mirroed chunks doesn't exist is because it's useless for the normal "download a file" use case. Sparse chunks of a file are basically useless outside of archival.
IPFS is a network that solves your coordination problem, compared to torrents it allows you to decide which chunks you want to store and it will even de-duplicate automatically across different "torrents" that happen to include the exact same byte-identical file.
Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understanding is that if I seed these torrents I'm going to get spammed with DMCA letters from publishers until my ISP gives up and cuts my service. If we need to seed exclusively through tor or VPNs in copyright-notice-ignoring countries, then that's not all that accessible to "regular people" anymore.
I wonder just how much of this "shadow library" content is stuff that's actually in the public domain and could be mirrored with no legal jeopardy whatsoever. Unfortunately, the low quality of catalog-like metadata that's available from so-called "shadow libraries" (including the one that's linked in the top comment) makes this a very hard question to answer. Even if that makes up only a handful of TB's or so, it would be worth mirroring the stuff - among other things, a reliable repository of copyright-free content would also be a valuable resource for "ethical" AI training and other such uses.
(I know that the linked blogpost mentions that they just don't bother mirroring "widely available collections" of public domain books. The interesting question is whether there's some "long tail" of PD content that might not have made it to the more well-known collections as of yet.)
FWIW, I've been getting (automated) DMCA notices for years (since 2015 or so) with no warnings or anything like that from my ISP. They just forward the notices because they have to.
Not to say there's no risks here, but this really depends on your jurisdiction, I think.
This does seem like it would be the way to handle such libraries, considering the immense size of them. I'd be curious to hear about any efforts in this area, of anyone knows of any.
Is remember back in the day 2008 you could download individual files from torrents (Amiga disk images). Is there a torrent toll that can compare individual files in a torrent and if the hashes are correct, download from a bunch and rebuild the torrent.
Some torrents add another ASCII advert like Amiga BBS's used to add back in the old day which used to result in dupes?.
Amazing that book piracy is a thing, I guess it's pretty big on this board as the majority of users on this board would be considered 'bookish' and know that a lot of the (technical) books that would like are not available at the local library.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve used shadow libraries before.
1. More often or not, I am in search of a single piece of information. Buying hundreds of pages of writing is not economical for this goal
2. Sometimes, I own the physical copy and want to search it. Buying a digital copy is a waste when I already own the physical one
3. Occasionally, the content is available to me via my library, but in the case of point 1, traveling all the ways is a waste of time. Some people don’t have access to a library.
4. Sometimes, I want to decide between two books, or see if the book has what I want before I purchase it.
5. A few times, the content I want disappeared, but there it is at the shadow library.
Being able to access computing books from late 80s and early 90s is great: DOS AutoCAD tutorial books (Laying out PCBs, tutorials) to see how it's changed. I also like being able to access books about programming the Amiga, I find that great. A lot of those authors have made the books available publicly for non-commercial use.
Being able to read old magazines of Byte magazine and the tutorials in Amiga Format and Cu Amiga are great as well. But those articles in early Byte magazine were of an amazing quality.
If you're not ashamed to admit it, perhaps that's because you recognize that it's not stealing, and that you don't actually believe in the concept of Intellectual Property, the legal fiction (invented relatively recently to prop up industries) that all of this is based on.
There are lots of us, so don't be afraid to say it loud. Intellectual Property doesn't exist and copyright as currently implemented is unjust, antisocial, and harmful.
Count me among those who don't believe in intellectual property. There are so many of us. Every time I express this, I find that I'm not alone.
Intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly on information, on bits, on numbers. And everybody intuitively understands the absurdity of it. Infringement happens every day at massive scales, people do not even realize they are infringing, it is natural to them.
Good! Iran is an undemocratic, authoritarian theocracy run by violent, repressive misogynists. These oppressive conditions undoubtedly influence academic research agendas (to say nothing of academic DEI). I can't imagine that research done in Iran will benefit humanity.
It would be better if Iranian intellectuals committed themselves to undermining the state, or escaping to a region where research is less constrained.
On the other hand, subversive research into Iranian social conditions may be critical to Iranians' path to freedom, and of course access to knowledge is critical for Iranic self-determinism and self-efficacy. So, insofar as its used by oppressed communities to support themselves, maintaining access to (free) books should be a crucial humanitarian priority. The trick is, really, how to make these libraries accessible to individuals but only insofar as they're not pawns of the regime. I think that's mostly impossible, as the principal aim of a totalitarian regime is to subordinate the entire populace as pawns to its agenda.
How is it said in "The Slave of Duty"?
> Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
Now guess which countries staged a coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, which brought the current oppressive regime to its power:
A very narrow minded view. There are plenty of undemocratic and authoritarian countries around the world, Iran is hardly unique and perhaps not even the worst. And so-called democratic countries are sometimes not much better - a trip through US foreign policy over the years is pretty horrific, the violent oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, and others. None of this should have anything to do with whether a country’s citizens and academics should have access to scientific knowledge and conduct research. In fact scientific knowledge and a better educated population is one of the best ways to combat authoritarianism and oppression.
American/Westerner tries not to condemn a nation of 90 million people because of their government's actions (impossible!). This is the same twisted, devilish logic that murdered millions of Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Afghans, and Viets, etc., because why not?
Condemn a nation? What part of "affection unspeakable" do you not understand?
All you have to assert is that Iran is not a totalitarian theocracy, and that academic research reliably benefits the Iranian people at the expense of their oppressive overlords' agenda.
I don't understand the rest of your comment. The answer to "why not murder millions of" any given nationality is because it is unspeakably horrible, grossly detrimental to human flourishing, and a violation of our highest ideals.
I really don't know why you're attributing to me the sentiment of "because why not?". I certainly don't intend to express it.
Sanctions against totalitarian states exist to prevent private companies from empowering murderers like Khamenei. You can argue that they're not murderers, but you can't argue that sanctions are imposed "because why not."
> Good! Iran is an undemocratic, authoritarian theocracy run by violent, repressive misogynists.
I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
Trump is a massive misogynist. Both Biden and Trump are internationally violent and both would actively support a genocide happening through their closest ally.
The next president of the US is either Misogynist Trump, or Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic. In this regard, both Iran and the US are picking from a pre-selected pool of candidates.
---
So, govt bad therefore people shouldn't be able to access research material?
> The trick is, really, how to make these libraries accessible to individuals but only insofar as they're not pawns of the regime.
Research is going to mostly be happening in universities, which are usually regulated by the government. Education is also connected to the government. The answer is you don't.
> Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
Just randomly checked the financials of one publisher of textbooks (Pearson) profits up 30%. So how did the judge assess the $30mil damages and who are the publishers that they would share it with? Assuming of course that they can get dollars from ether.
The spirit is commendable, and the idea is arguably nice. But the free (as in speech) internet is over. I don't like it, but the days of these libraries are counted. Just like the other pirate sites. (Don't visit torrentfreak.com, if you don't want to get depressed. It reports bad news every day, and it only gets worse lately.)
And let the authors starve? I hate these takes that basically just ignore the real, serious downsides to essentially saying that copyright shouldn't exist.
And "let knowledge be free" just means you want something (that took considerable resources to produce in the first place) for nothing, and are trying to dress it up into some more noble cause. You should just replace that sentence with "I want free shit."
Look, I'm not at all arguing that the publishers are angels, but I also don't care because it shouldn't matter - we don't write laws so that they should only be enforced when "good people" have a claim vs. "bad people". I also think that there are plenty of issues with copyright laws (primarily their extended time-frames), but just because there are issues doesn't mean I think copyright shouldn't exist at all.
Show us 1 author available in shadow libraries who would literally starve. It's ridiculous. If you can pay, you'll pay. And if you can't you were never part of the market
Obviously "starving" was hyperbole, but that doesn't change the fact that they wrote it and you just want it for free. I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
IP - unlike actual real property - is not really defensible by property owners, other than using state monopoly forces. IP is also very hard to globally enforce. Why should society - all societies - pay for such enforcement? IP can only be protected when it's least valuable to all - including the owner: when it's not disclosed/distributed. So, it's a give and take: accept distribution and accept that some people will not care about your "rights" OR don't distribute (and don't benefit from non-distribution)
> I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
And I have never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "intellectual rights" crowd about why this justifies the usage of violence against the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
> you're also part of the "I'm going to call anything I don't like 'violence'" crowd.
Every law is a control program for violence - this is what laws are for. While I agree that "no laws" don't work, I am part of the "violence should be used with utter care" and "violence is the utter last resort" crowds. :-)
It is good that authors should be remunerated;
and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them
is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil.
For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil;
but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is
necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers
for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is
an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most
innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never
let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a
premium on vicious pleasures.
I admit, however, the necessity of giving a bounty
to genius and learning. In order to give such a bounty,
I willingly submit even to this severe and burdensome tax.
Nay, I am ready to increase the tax, if it can be shown
that by so doing I should proportionally increase the
bounty.
My complaint is, that my honorable and learned friend
doubles, triples, quadruples, the tax, and makes scarcely
any perceptible addition to the bounty.
Just as the absurd Acts which prohibited the sale of game
were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd
revenue Acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler,
so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers.
At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side.
Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out
of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them
restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains.
No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful
transactions.
Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end.
Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers
will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital
will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art
will be employed to evade legal pursuit;
and the whole nation will be in the plot.
Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong
and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say
where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.
The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace
and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create.
And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints
on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent,
annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding
the living.
"This law" would extend copyright beyond the lifetime of the author. It's now life plus 70 years. Possibly more, who even knows or cares. We're all gonna be long dead before our culture enters the public domain.
Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. The time for compromise has long since passed. These monopolies have become intolerable. Only thing we care about is their end.
I literally said right in my comment that you replied to that I thought copyright terms were too long. But if you're going to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and insist copyright shouldn't exist, you should at least be honest about what the consequences of that would be, and again I never see that sort of honest assessment from the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
Heck, even arguing about overly-long copyrights seems disingenuous in this case. This wasn't an article about Mickey Mouse. I wasn't previously familiar with Libgen, but given its focus, I would assume most of the pirated material has living authors.
It is desirable that we should have a supply of good books;
we cannot have such a supply unless men of letters are liberally remunerated:
and the least objectionable way of remunerating them is by means of copyright.
You cannot depend for literary instruction and amusement on the leisure of men
occupied in the pursuits of active life. Such men may occasionally produce
compositions of great merit. But you must not look to such men for works
which require deep meditation and long research. Works of that kind you can
expect only from persons who make literature the business of their lives.
Men who make authorship the business of their lives. We shall have less of them. I accept these consequences. Let it be. It's the future they chose.
I do have one hope though. Later in the text, he expresses a rather low opinion of patronage. And he isn't wrong: patronage by governments, churches and moneyed elites obviously distorted the creativity of authors and that is not at all desirable. That's why copyright is advanced as the least bad solution.
However, modern technology has changed patronage. It's now possible for wide audiences to subsidize the work of their favorite creators. It does not require artificial scarcity. They are rewarded for the act of creating, not the final product.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way forward. Because enforcing copyright in the 21st century will require tyranny the likes of which should give pause to everyone who posts on Hacker News. It will literally destroy computing freedom as we know it today. And that's a consequence I don't accept. I'd sooner see creators find another job.
Yeah, after libgen didn't work properly anymore since last month or so, I donate to AA each month for speedy downloads. Has the advantage that it also works for papers, so no more libgen/scihub split.
I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.
The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.
I imagine your self published works are available for a reasonable price. In this event, piracy is less tempting. Papers and academic books often cost upwards of $75.
Furthermore, assuming your work is priced reasonably, imagine the content was not available within a shadow library. Would the people pirating it have paid? Or would they have given up, barred due to their financial situation. Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for
All of my college text books were leaps and bounds more than this, my lowest costing book might have been $75. Most of the books cost well over $150 and many of them couldn’t be purchased online. Most came with some online class learning aid which if you bought the book second hand you’d have to pay the full book price to get the access code anyway. These publishers are out of their minds.
But I'm sure you know at least some people who have downloaded things just to save even a single dollar.
No, I don't. I've watched people pirate things, certainly, but never have I watched them while thinking "if piracy wasn't an option, they would have paid". Indeed, for many people piracy is a long and difficult process as they kludge through ad-laden pages and dead links. That's why services like Spotify are so successful. On paper, you could have pirated the music, but in practice piracy is much harder. There is nothing analogous for the publishing industry, but I would gladly pay upwards of $20 a month for access to all books.
> “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
1. In very few circumstances are the authors setting the price of their work. The publishers do, and the authors receive a small cut.
2. Here, you are contending that knowledge should only be available to those who can pay. That's a completely valid opinion, but let's just be clear about what it is insinuating.
You need to look beyond yourself and the fruits of the labour you feel entitled to.
Look at the whole market, look at market prices, understand how piracy works. If you want to not have your work pirated, you probably have to do what Steam did for video games (and very successfully!) You must sell your work at a price and format that beats piracy for the end user. Piracy involves hassle and risk. But it is the only way to get DRM-free content for most consumers that they truly get to keep forever. If you sell your book for a price your target audience can’t afford in relation to the value it provides, and you may not even sell your book in a true digital ownership way, but only effectively license it, then some consumers won’t want to buy that and piracy is an alternative.
You may say that you are unwilling to offer your work at a price palatable to people more than piracy. And that is your prerogative. But you will always have a degree of piracy in what you put out then. This is the market reality.
You should calculate what makes most sense to you — maybe it is higher price and piracy, maybe it is lower price, DRM-free and no piracy, or if neither work and you truly can’t sell your work in the actual reality of the market, maybe not doing the work makes sense.
The flaw in your argument is that in most cases, the audience can afford it, they just choose not to pay when it is available freely with little effort.
My argument doesn’t speak about the affordability. It speaks about an exchange of money for value. Not if one can spend the money, but if that money would be well-spent. :)
Piracy is often significant effort and risk. Not high but significant. First, one must learn the means to pirate content. Second, they must keep strong privacy and security habits while doing so. Third, pirated content may have malware, even pdfs. Finally, the quality is often a bit lower. There are very real downsides to privacy — effort and others. Then there are also benefits that I spoke of.
Steam has largely validated what I’m saying. So no need for extra arguing. Look into how it cleaned up video game piracy. Many people used to, especially in less economically developed regions such as Eastern Europe, pirate as main means of video game consumption. Now, it’s mostly Valve’s Steam.
>I am a self published author. So anyone can alienate me from the fruits of my labour?
Do you put shareware/donationware messages in your book? Hey I need to eat if you do download this send me what you believe this book is worth to this website?
>And yes, I have come across free copies of my work.
I really do feel sorry for you. There would be nothing worse than something that you have poured your heart and soul into and just gets stolen. I'm not a fan of thieves, nothing worse than spending hours doing a job you hate, buying something and to get it stolen AND you must get even more annoyed if the people are making money if your work.
As some one who struggles writing lab reports and doing case studies in Engineering I find it difficult to write compared to doing the calculations. All the time doing the research I can not imagine how it must feet for you.
Are there any numbers on how the availability of books in this way negatively impacts sales? Bear in mind that often people resort to such libraries because they are unable to buy a copy (out of print, not available in their country), can’t afford to buy (so they wouldn’t be paying anyway) or just want to look something up (wouldn’t bother buying the book just for that).
So you want to multiply your benefits but not accept such with your deficits? That's the advantage of digital distribution vs typical labor distribution. When I did laborer work I had no way to easily multiply my work output as it's not intellectual work, for the most part. If you make a moderate income, you should feel very entitled and lucky if you complain when you can easily distribute and multiply your labor as opposed to those who work in more physical fields. But someone might say 'yeah, well get a better job' but the point is when someone's working a very laborious and dangerous job out in the elements, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone making good on the amplification of intellectual labor.
As to your question, I'm sure those who were more intellectually inclined throughout history tended to do well despite not having a printing press and its offspring. If you're truly putting out something useful to the people, be it ideas, stories, etc, then you should have no problem getting by from your output.
People pirating your work were less likely to purchase it anyway, likely because it was economically not feasible to do so in the first place, but with the new readers you have, its likely that some of them do end up purchasing it at a later date. Getting robbed by piracy is mostly a fiction and nothing more.
This may be the case in the short-term. If piracy is left unchecked, the norm eventually becomes 'free', for the work being pirated and a very low percentage of people will pay for it.
A good example of this is larger projects in the OSS community. Large companies don't pay for it, because it's just expected to be free.
Software is used by enterprises and by individuals. Books are mostly used by indivuals (yeah, I know your Friendly Corp might have an educational budget for you).
Enterprises are less likely to pay for books (as the whole cost of running the procurement process is prohibitive). But people (like individuals) don't have this limitation.
As a counterpoint just take a look at web serials, they usually have hundreds of chapters available for free and the more popular ones are still making 6-7 figures a year through patreon memberships. People are more than willing to pay for something they enjoy even if it's freely available.
Maybe it's time to "publish" a revised version of your work to include a preamble to the pirate readers with your crypto wallet address. You might be surprised when you find that many pirates are very generous individuals if you provided them the motivation and means.
Your businesses model is wrong. Don't make your businesses/profit model be one of artificial scarcity, as it was in the previous millennium.
Instead, write a TOC and say a first chapter. And give it free. Then establish a target price/profit you want in total for each additional chapter. Setup a "fund me" and release the chapter ONLY after you've received your full payment.
If your content is good, people will pay enough for your next chapter. And you will be fairly compensated for your writing work.
You got off lucky. Imagine if one of those government Mecca's of sanctioned piracy called a library had bought your book and put it on public exhibition for free? The estimated losses to the publishing industry are in the billions of dollars in the last decade alone. They are freely given physical copies of your copyrighted work with the mere promise that they will be returned. Many are stolen, and when they are the thief is rarely charged, and the copyrighted material is simply replaced so that it may be made public again. Meanwhile you get a payment equivalent to maybe a fast food meal.
Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also. And he who hinders this, — what character does he assume towards his age and posterity? Louder than with a thousand voices, by his actions he proclaims into the deafened ear of the world present and to come — 'As long as I live at least, the men around me shall not become wiser or better; — for in their progress I too, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, should be dragged forward in some direction; and this I detest I will not become more enlightened, — I will not become nobler. Darkness and perversion are my elements, and I will summon all my powers together that I may not be dislodged from them.'
Which side are you supporting here? The ones who claiming they should be paid to support their work, or the ones claiming that everyone should work "for the progress of the whole human race" rather than for money?
> The ones who claiming they should be paid to support their work,
It would be much easier if one side was the authors. The problem is it's "rights holders".
As a frequent reader on RoyalRoad and occasional Patreon supporter of one or the other author I am well aware that many authors indeed to have a problem of theft of their stories.
I doubt though that any of those law suits are meant to protect those little guys.
In addition, I think we need something else. Digital copying is so very different from theft of tangible objects that I think society as a whole would be much better off if we manage to come up with a different method to pay authors, without the huge amount of effort and infrastructure to artificially limit distribution.
I mean, it kind of works for music? Far from ideal, but at least it's something. Okay, it works a tiny bit better. On second thought, maybe it "works" when I use a radio Yerevan kind of definition...
I don't understand how this kind of judgement is possible, I understand that if you don't show up for a trial you can have a default judgement against you, but don't you have to be served? I know you can include John Does on the defendant list, but doesn't somebody have to be served?
I am not a lawyer, but I was intrigued by the question so I did My Own Research (tm).
Apparently the answer is that you can sue a web site and serve the Internet service provider and whoever registered the domain name.
I would imagine that if there's an anonymizer for the domain they are accepting responsibility for delivering such subpoenas. (I didn't see that started as fact.)
But while ISP's are being ordered to block the site, the $30 million judgment is directed at Libgen itself. Not an ISP or registrar. So I don't think that can be the full answer here.
> Last year, Libgen also told users that it's primarily funded through Google advertising. In the video, Libgen was warning users that while admins are difficult to unmask, "Google gets informed of every download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded, and when they downloaded it."
In my opinion, this seems like a particularly stupid risk to take as a pirate site. Ad networks would be in a prime position to dox all your users and, were the publishers so inclined, they could easily get that data and target your individual users for legal harassment.
Are the costs of running Libgen seriously that high that they have to defray them with advertising specifically?
First, while Google aggregates lots of data for analytics and advertising, and if subpoenaed may be able to say that a given user visited a given pirate site, they only know the user opened pages -- not that they clicked a download link or successfully downloaded an ebook, because the ebook file itself contains no Google advertising.
It's not illegal to do a search on a pirate site. The only illegal part is the downloading, and ad networks don't have any record of that part.
It depends whether your goal is "to make information free" or "give away stolen goods to trick users into giving you their PII so you can monetize with internet ad bucks".
Just because you like what someone is doing in principle doesn't mean they're good people doing it for good reasons.
If they can't collect from a specific person, "judgements" are just some pencil neck running around with a clipboard shouting randomly and freaking out.
> McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer...
Hilarious and sad typo. What a clown world we're living in, where the worthless AI-generated virtue-signaling drivel from LinkedIn is allowed to continue existing, but this vast trove of knowledge that's broadly useful for humanity is forced into the shadows.
In the case of this lawsuit they're suing unknown individuals. The case is Cengage Learning, Inc. v. Does 1-50. Apparently it's a US legal convention to just spitball the number of members of a group of unknown alleged coconspirators to 50.
https://annas-archive.org/blog/critical-window.html
Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)
To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.
The critical thing here is that regular people can help. The archive is already split into many O(GB)-sized chunks. We need to ensure each chunk has many, many copies.
Torrents are a widely-understood, robust way to mirror large files. But there's no "meta-coordination" built in to the protocol. It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks. The optimization function here is maximal chunk availability, subject to individual storage limits and reliability (ie: how often they're online).
It should be easy to just press a button to join a shadow library, allocated 100GB, and be part of the mission.
The best effort I've seen in this space is some guy running a script that crawls the number of seeders for a list of SciHub torrents. Users manually pick the ones with the lowest seeds. All very cumbersome, and prone to staleness.
Of course, this is all a technical problem, separate from infringing copyright or whatever. In the same way as torrents being a technical solution for sharing files, in a general way.
> It's not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks.
I don't know if it's strictly desirable to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks, because that provides an avenue for bad actors to attack that assignment (e.g. by e.g. claiming to have a block to drive peers away, but never actually serving it).
It would be possible to have the swarm behave cooperatively based on heuristics, though. Your client gets a copy of what peers have what chunks, so it has enough information to make its own decision on what chunks need to be mirrored the most. A sufficiently clever algorithm would get pretty close to a centralized cooperation server.
Iirc, some extant torrent clients have similar features where they download the "hot" chunks first (the chunks with the most leechers, for private tracker ratios). I suspect the only reason an "archive/sparse" variant of that where it only downloads poorly mirroed chunks doesn't exist is because it's useless for the normal "download a file" use case. Sparse chunks of a file are basically useless outside of archival.
IPFS is a network that solves your coordination problem, compared to torrents it allows you to decide which chunks you want to store and it will even de-duplicate automatically across different "torrents" that happen to include the exact same byte-identical file.
Though with its persistent brainsplits it's barely usable, unfortunately.
Could you elaborate? IPFS is already being used quite successfully by LibGen and Z-lib AFAIK.
> regular people can help
Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understanding is that if I seed these torrents I'm going to get spammed with DMCA letters from publishers until my ISP gives up and cuts my service. If we need to seed exclusively through tor or VPNs in copyright-notice-ignoring countries, then that's not all that accessible to "regular people" anymore.
I wonder just how much of this "shadow library" content is stuff that's actually in the public domain and could be mirrored with no legal jeopardy whatsoever. Unfortunately, the low quality of catalog-like metadata that's available from so-called "shadow libraries" (including the one that's linked in the top comment) makes this a very hard question to answer. Even if that makes up only a handful of TB's or so, it would be worth mirroring the stuff - among other things, a reliable repository of copyright-free content would also be a valuable resource for "ethical" AI training and other such uses.
(I know that the linked blogpost mentions that they just don't bother mirroring "widely available collections" of public domain books. The interesting question is whether there's some "long tail" of PD content that might not have made it to the more well-known collections as of yet.)
FWIW, I've been getting (automated) DMCA notices for years (since 2015 or so) with no warnings or anything like that from my ISP. They just forward the notices because they have to.
Not to say there's no risks here, but this really depends on your jurisdiction, I think.
This does seem like it would be the way to handle such libraries, considering the immense size of them. I'd be curious to hear about any efforts in this area, of anyone knows of any.
Is remember back in the day 2008 you could download individual files from torrents (Amiga disk images). Is there a torrent toll that can compare individual files in a torrent and if the hashes are correct, download from a bunch and rebuild the torrent.
Some torrents add another ASCII advert like Amiga BBS's used to add back in the old day which used to result in dupes?.
Amazing that book piracy is a thing, I guess it's pretty big on this board as the majority of users on this board would be considered 'bookish' and know that a lot of the (technical) books that would like are not available at the local library.
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I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve used shadow libraries before.
1. More often or not, I am in search of a single piece of information. Buying hundreds of pages of writing is not economical for this goal
2. Sometimes, I own the physical copy and want to search it. Buying a digital copy is a waste when I already own the physical one
3. Occasionally, the content is available to me via my library, but in the case of point 1, traveling all the ways is a waste of time. Some people don’t have access to a library.
4. Sometimes, I want to decide between two books, or see if the book has what I want before I purchase it.
5. A few times, the content I want disappeared, but there it is at the shadow library.
Being able to access computing books from late 80s and early 90s is great: DOS AutoCAD tutorial books (Laying out PCBs, tutorials) to see how it's changed. I also like being able to access books about programming the Amiga, I find that great. A lot of those authors have made the books available publicly for non-commercial use.
Being able to read old magazines of Byte magazine and the tutorials in Amiga Format and Cu Amiga are great as well. But those articles in early Byte magazine were of an amazing quality.
If you're not ashamed to admit it, perhaps that's because you recognize that it's not stealing, and that you don't actually believe in the concept of Intellectual Property, the legal fiction (invented relatively recently to prop up industries) that all of this is based on.
There are lots of us, so don't be afraid to say it loud. Intellectual Property doesn't exist and copyright as currently implemented is unjust, antisocial, and harmful.
Count me among those who don't believe in intellectual property. There are so many of us. Every time I express this, I find that I'm not alone.
Intellectual property is a government-granted monopoly on information, on bits, on numbers. And everybody intuitively understands the absurdity of it. Infringement happens every day at massive scales, people do not even realize they are infringing, it is natural to them.
Here in Brazil shadow libraries essentially make research possible. Paying for ebooks in US dollar is prohibitive to most academics.
In Iran it’s the only option. Sanctions basically make it impossible to buy books.
Good! Iran is an undemocratic, authoritarian theocracy run by violent, repressive misogynists. These oppressive conditions undoubtedly influence academic research agendas (to say nothing of academic DEI). I can't imagine that research done in Iran will benefit humanity.
It would be better if Iranian intellectuals committed themselves to undermining the state, or escaping to a region where research is less constrained.
On the other hand, subversive research into Iranian social conditions may be critical to Iranians' path to freedom, and of course access to knowledge is critical for Iranic self-determinism and self-efficacy. So, insofar as its used by oppressed communities to support themselves, maintaining access to (free) books should be a crucial humanitarian priority. The trick is, really, how to make these libraries accessible to individuals but only insofar as they're not pawns of the regime. I think that's mostly impossible, as the principal aim of a totalitarian regime is to subordinate the entire populace as pawns to its agenda.
How is it said in "The Slave of Duty"?
> Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
Now guess which countries staged a coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, which brought the current oppressive regime to its power:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
Two wrongs don't make a right.
A very narrow minded view. There are plenty of undemocratic and authoritarian countries around the world, Iran is hardly unique and perhaps not even the worst. And so-called democratic countries are sometimes not much better - a trip through US foreign policy over the years is pretty horrific, the violent oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, and others. None of this should have anything to do with whether a country’s citizens and academics should have access to scientific knowledge and conduct research. In fact scientific knowledge and a better educated population is one of the best ways to combat authoritarianism and oppression.
> There are plenty of undemocratic and authoritarian countries around the world
Well, yes, but I was responding to a comment re: Iran.
> scientific knowledge and a better educated population is one of the best ways to combat authoritarianism and oppression.
If that's true, then I am wrong.
Blaming the innocents that live under a brutal regime seems counterproductive.
Blaming the innocents? I thought I was very clear that the oppressed Iranic people were not the problem.
American/Westerner tries not to condemn a nation of 90 million people because of their government's actions (impossible!). This is the same twisted, devilish logic that murdered millions of Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Afghans, and Viets, etc., because why not?
Condemn a nation? What part of "affection unspeakable" do you not understand?
All you have to assert is that Iran is not a totalitarian theocracy, and that academic research reliably benefits the Iranian people at the expense of their oppressive overlords' agenda.
I don't understand the rest of your comment. The answer to "why not murder millions of" any given nationality is because it is unspeakably horrible, grossly detrimental to human flourishing, and a violation of our highest ideals.
I really don't know why you're attributing to me the sentiment of "because why not?". I certainly don't intend to express it.
Sanctions against totalitarian states exist to prevent private companies from empowering murderers like Khamenei. You can argue that they're not murderers, but you can't argue that sanctions are imposed "because why not."
> Good! Iran is an undemocratic, authoritarian theocracy run by violent, repressive misogynists.
I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
Trump is a massive misogynist. Both Biden and Trump are internationally violent and both would actively support a genocide happening through their closest ally.
The next president of the US is either Misogynist Trump, or Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic. In this regard, both Iran and the US are picking from a pre-selected pool of candidates.
---
So, govt bad therefore people shouldn't be able to access research material?
> The trick is, really, how to make these libraries accessible to individuals but only insofar as they're not pawns of the regime.
Research is going to mostly be happening in universities, which are usually regulated by the government. Education is also connected to the government. The answer is you don't.
> Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
Thanks?
Just randomly checked the financials of one publisher of textbooks (Pearson) profits up 30%. So how did the judge assess the $30mil damages and who are the publishers that they would share it with? Assuming of course that they can get dollars from ether.
The spirit is commendable, and the idea is arguably nice. But the free (as in speech) internet is over. I don't like it, but the days of these libraries are counted. Just like the other pirate sites. (Don't visit torrentfreak.com, if you don't want to get depressed. It reports bad news every day, and it only gets worse lately.)
Yandex is an exceptional resource for finding torrent sites these days. It’s still out there.
Tpb is still up after what 25 years?
If they can't operate on the clearnet they will take it to Tor or I2P.
> Let knowledge be free.
And let the authors starve? I hate these takes that basically just ignore the real, serious downsides to essentially saying that copyright shouldn't exist.
And "let knowledge be free" just means you want something (that took considerable resources to produce in the first place) for nothing, and are trying to dress it up into some more noble cause. You should just replace that sentence with "I want free shit."
Look, I'm not at all arguing that the publishers are angels, but I also don't care because it shouldn't matter - we don't write laws so that they should only be enforced when "good people" have a claim vs. "bad people". I also think that there are plenty of issues with copyright laws (primarily their extended time-frames), but just because there are issues doesn't mean I think copyright shouldn't exist at all.
Show us 1 author available in shadow libraries who would literally starve. It's ridiculous. If you can pay, you'll pay. And if you can't you were never part of the market
Obviously "starving" was hyperbole, but that doesn't change the fact that they wrote it and you just want it for free. I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
IP - unlike actual real property - is not really defensible by property owners, other than using state monopoly forces. IP is also very hard to globally enforce. Why should society - all societies - pay for such enforcement? IP can only be protected when it's least valuable to all - including the owner: when it's not disclosed/distributed. So, it's a give and take: accept distribution and accept that some people will not care about your "rights" OR don't distribute (and don't benefit from non-distribution)
> I've never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "knowledge should be free" crowd about why creators of this knowledge shouldn't be compensated.
And I have never heard a cogent, logically consistent argument from the "intellectual rights" crowd about why this justifies the usage of violence against the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
Ahh, so in addition to the "knowledge should be free" crowd, you're also part of the "I'm going to call anything I don't like 'violence'" crowd.
> you're also part of the "I'm going to call anything I don't like 'violence'" crowd.
Every law is a control program for violence - this is what laws are for. While I agree that "no laws" don't work, I am part of the "violence should be used with utter care" and "violence is the utter last resort" crowds. :-)
Who cares?
Nearly two hundred years ago one man warned everyone this would happen. Nobody listened. These are the consequences.
https://www.thepublicdomain.org/2014/07/24/macaulay-on-copyr...
"This law" would extend copyright beyond the lifetime of the author. It's now life plus 70 years. Possibly more, who even knows or cares. We're all gonna be long dead before our culture enters the public domain.Balance? Compromise? We don't want to hear it. The time for compromise has long since passed. These monopolies have become intolerable. Only thing we care about is their end.
I literally said right in my comment that you replied to that I thought copyright terms were too long. But if you're going to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and insist copyright shouldn't exist, you should at least be honest about what the consequences of that would be, and again I never see that sort of honest assessment from the "knowledge should be free" crowd.
Heck, even arguing about overly-long copyrights seems disingenuous in this case. This wasn't an article about Mickey Mouse. I wasn't previously familiar with Libgen, but given its focus, I would assume most of the pirated material has living authors.
I am being honest with the consequences.
Men who make authorship the business of their lives. We shall have less of them. I accept these consequences. Let it be. It's the future they chose.I do have one hope though. Later in the text, he expresses a rather low opinion of patronage. And he isn't wrong: patronage by governments, churches and moneyed elites obviously distorted the creativity of authors and that is not at all desirable. That's why copyright is advanced as the least bad solution.
However, modern technology has changed patronage. It's now possible for wide audiences to subsidize the work of their favorite creators. It does not require artificial scarcity. They are rewarded for the act of creating, not the final product.
As far as I'm concerned, this is the only way forward. Because enforcing copyright in the 21st century will require tyranny the likes of which should give pause to everyone who posts on Hacker News. It will literally destroy computing freedom as we know it today. And that's a consequence I don't accept. I'd sooner see creators find another job.
authors are already starving; publishers don't want to pay them either.
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Yeah, after libgen didn't work properly anymore since last month or so, I donate to AA each month for speedy downloads. Has the advantage that it also works for papers, so no more libgen/scihub split.
What's AA in this context...?
Anna's Archive
Angela's Archive
I am a self published author. So anyone can alienate me from the fruits of my labour?
Seems opposite of the ideals of “revolución”.
And yes, I have come across free copies of my work.
How would the revolución handle this increasingly common situation (self published authors)?
I'm also self published. I would rather a thousand people steal and read and interact with and talk about my work than to be able to eat selling it to a privileged few. The free software movement is a parallel example of this viewpoint.
The economic reality of today is that words and publishing are cheap. If you have something to say and need to get the word out to as many people as possible, that's wonderful. If you need to eat, then accept this is how it is and write for an audience that's willing to pay you for your work even if it's available for free.
I don't write so well when I'm hungry. It makes me grumpy and irritable.
I imagine your self published works are available for a reasonable price. In this event, piracy is less tempting. Papers and academic books often cost upwards of $75.
Furthermore, assuming your work is priced reasonably, imagine the content was not available within a shadow library. Would the people pirating it have paid? Or would they have given up, barred due to their financial situation. Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for
> academic books often cost upwards of $75.
All of my college text books were leaps and bounds more than this, my lowest costing book might have been $75. Most of the books cost well over $150 and many of them couldn’t be purchased online. Most came with some online class learning aid which if you bought the book second hand you’d have to pay the full book price to get the access code anyway. These publishers are out of their minds.
Would the people pirating it have paid?
Some of them, if my writing was of any value.
Personally, I can say confidently that I have never once pirated something I would have otherwise paid for
That's fantastic. Thank you. But I'm sure you know at least some people who have downloaded things just to save even a single dollar.
But I'm sure you know at least some people who have downloaded things just to save even a single dollar.
No, I don't. I've watched people pirate things, certainly, but never have I watched them while thinking "if piracy wasn't an option, they would have paid". Indeed, for many people piracy is a long and difficult process as they kludge through ad-laden pages and dead links. That's why services like Spotify are so successful. On paper, you could have pirated the music, but in practice piracy is much harder. There is nothing analogous for the publishing industry, but I would gladly pay upwards of $20 a month for access to all books.
> “We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.”
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/valves-gabe-newell-says-pir...
This was true in 2011 and it's just as true now.
People have the right to set the price for their work and output. If you don't think it is a fair price, don't use the work.
1. In very few circumstances are the authors setting the price of their work. The publishers do, and the authors receive a small cut.
2. Here, you are contending that knowledge should only be available to those who can pay. That's a completely valid opinion, but let's just be clear about what it is insinuating.
> If you don't think it is a fair price, don't use the work.
If the price is not set "fairly" (in the sense of "I'm willing to pay this price"), people will look for the good on another market (the gray market).
You need to look beyond yourself and the fruits of the labour you feel entitled to.
Look at the whole market, look at market prices, understand how piracy works. If you want to not have your work pirated, you probably have to do what Steam did for video games (and very successfully!) You must sell your work at a price and format that beats piracy for the end user. Piracy involves hassle and risk. But it is the only way to get DRM-free content for most consumers that they truly get to keep forever. If you sell your book for a price your target audience can’t afford in relation to the value it provides, and you may not even sell your book in a true digital ownership way, but only effectively license it, then some consumers won’t want to buy that and piracy is an alternative.
You may say that you are unwilling to offer your work at a price palatable to people more than piracy. And that is your prerogative. But you will always have a degree of piracy in what you put out then. This is the market reality.
You should calculate what makes most sense to you — maybe it is higher price and piracy, maybe it is lower price, DRM-free and no piracy, or if neither work and you truly can’t sell your work in the actual reality of the market, maybe not doing the work makes sense.
The flaw in your argument is that in most cases, the audience can afford it, they just choose not to pay when it is available freely with little effort.
My argument doesn’t speak about the affordability. It speaks about an exchange of money for value. Not if one can spend the money, but if that money would be well-spent. :)
Piracy is often significant effort and risk. Not high but significant. First, one must learn the means to pirate content. Second, they must keep strong privacy and security habits while doing so. Third, pirated content may have malware, even pdfs. Finally, the quality is often a bit lower. There are very real downsides to privacy — effort and others. Then there are also benefits that I spoke of.
Steam has largely validated what I’m saying. So no need for extra arguing. Look into how it cleaned up video game piracy. Many people used to, especially in less economically developed regions such as Eastern Europe, pirate as main means of video game consumption. Now, it’s mostly Valve’s Steam.
>I am a self published author. So anyone can alienate me from the fruits of my labour? Do you put shareware/donationware messages in your book? Hey I need to eat if you do download this send me what you believe this book is worth to this website? >And yes, I have come across free copies of my work. I really do feel sorry for you. There would be nothing worse than something that you have poured your heart and soul into and just gets stolen. I'm not a fan of thieves, nothing worse than spending hours doing a job you hate, buying something and to get it stolen AND you must get even more annoyed if the people are making money if your work. As some one who struggles writing lab reports and doing case studies in Engineering I find it difficult to write compared to doing the calculations. All the time doing the research I can not imagine how it must feet for you.
Are there any numbers on how the availability of books in this way negatively impacts sales? Bear in mind that often people resort to such libraries because they are unable to buy a copy (out of print, not available in their country), can’t afford to buy (so they wouldn’t be paying anyway) or just want to look something up (wouldn’t bother buying the book just for that).
So you want to multiply your benefits but not accept such with your deficits? That's the advantage of digital distribution vs typical labor distribution. When I did laborer work I had no way to easily multiply my work output as it's not intellectual work, for the most part. If you make a moderate income, you should feel very entitled and lucky if you complain when you can easily distribute and multiply your labor as opposed to those who work in more physical fields. But someone might say 'yeah, well get a better job' but the point is when someone's working a very laborious and dangerous job out in the elements, it's hard to feel sorry for anyone making good on the amplification of intellectual labor.
As to your question, I'm sure those who were more intellectually inclined throughout history tended to do well despite not having a printing press and its offspring. If you're truly putting out something useful to the people, be it ideas, stories, etc, then you should have no problem getting by from your output.
People pirating your work were less likely to purchase it anyway, likely because it was economically not feasible to do so in the first place, but with the new readers you have, its likely that some of them do end up purchasing it at a later date. Getting robbed by piracy is mostly a fiction and nothing more.
This may be the case in the short-term. If piracy is left unchecked, the norm eventually becomes 'free', for the work being pirated and a very low percentage of people will pay for it.
A good example of this is larger projects in the OSS community. Large companies don't pay for it, because it's just expected to be free.
Interesting point. But there's one difference.
Software is used by enterprises and by individuals. Books are mostly used by indivuals (yeah, I know your Friendly Corp might have an educational budget for you).
Enterprises are less likely to pay for books (as the whole cost of running the procurement process is prohibitive). But people (like individuals) don't have this limitation.
As a counterpoint just take a look at web serials, they usually have hundreds of chapters available for free and the more popular ones are still making 6-7 figures a year through patreon memberships. People are more than willing to pay for something they enjoy even if it's freely available.
I would assert that such assertions come with a fairly strong burden of proof. "You probably got paid anyway" sounds too much like sour grapes.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/09/eu-study-finds-piracy...
"EU study finds piracy doesn’t hurt game sales, may actually help"
This study was suppressed until Felix Reda leaked it:
https://x.com/Senficon/status/910483224731820033
Maybe it's time to "publish" a revised version of your work to include a preamble to the pirate readers with your crypto wallet address. You might be surprised when you find that many pirates are very generous individuals if you provided them the motivation and means.
Your businesses model is wrong. Don't make your businesses/profit model be one of artificial scarcity, as it was in the previous millennium.
Instead, write a TOC and say a first chapter. And give it free. Then establish a target price/profit you want in total for each additional chapter. Setup a "fund me" and release the chapter ONLY after you've received your full payment.
If your content is good, people will pay enough for your next chapter. And you will be fairly compensated for your writing work.
Interesting idea. This might work for educational books, but would it work for literature?
You got off lucky. Imagine if one of those government Mecca's of sanctioned piracy called a library had bought your book and put it on public exhibition for free? The estimated losses to the publishing industry are in the billions of dollars in the last decade alone. They are freely given physical copies of your copyrighted work with the mere promise that they will be returned. Many are stolen, and when they are the thief is rarely charged, and the copyrighted material is simply replaced so that it may be made public again. Meanwhile you get a payment equivalent to maybe a fast food meal.
Upon the progress of knowledge the whole progress of the human race is immediately dependent: he who retards that, hinders this also. And he who hinders this, — what character does he assume towards his age and posterity? Louder than with a thousand voices, by his actions he proclaims into the deafened ear of the world present and to come — 'As long as I live at least, the men around me shall not become wiser or better; — for in their progress I too, notwithstanding all my efforts to the contrary, should be dragged forward in some direction; and this I detest I will not become more enlightened, — I will not become nobler. Darkness and perversion are my elements, and I will summon all my powers together that I may not be dislodged from them.'
- Fichte, The Vocation of the Scholar.
Which side are you supporting here? The ones who claiming they should be paid to support their work, or the ones claiming that everyone should work "for the progress of the whole human race" rather than for money?
> The ones who claiming they should be paid to support their work,
It would be much easier if one side was the authors. The problem is it's "rights holders".
As a frequent reader on RoyalRoad and occasional Patreon supporter of one or the other author I am well aware that many authors indeed to have a problem of theft of their stories.
Examples:
- https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/7183/crashed-into-fantasy/...
- https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/33922/ashes-of-empires/cha...
I doubt though that any of those law suits are meant to protect those little guys.
In addition, I think we need something else. Digital copying is so very different from theft of tangible objects that I think society as a whole would be much better off if we manage to come up with a different method to pay authors, without the huge amount of effort and infrastructure to artificially limit distribution.
I mean, it kind of works for music? Far from ideal, but at least it's something. Okay, it works a tiny bit better. On second thought, maybe it "works" when I use a radio Yerevan kind of definition...
I don't understand how this kind of judgement is possible, I understand that if you don't show up for a trial you can have a default judgement against you, but don't you have to be served? I know you can include John Does on the defendant list, but doesn't somebody have to be served?
I am not a lawyer, but I was intrigued by the question so I did My Own Research (tm).
Apparently the answer is that you can sue a web site and serve the Internet service provider and whoever registered the domain name.
I would imagine that if there's an anonymizer for the domain they are accepting responsibility for delivering such subpoenas. (I didn't see that started as fact.)
But while ISP's are being ordered to block the site, the $30 million judgment is directed at Libgen itself. Not an ISP or registrar. So I don't think that can be the full answer here.
I'm very curious too about the legal details.
Is it because this is an injunction rather than the outcome of a trial? But I thought an injunction could only stop behavior, not order a fine.
Or does it have something to do with it being a corporation rather than a person? Or with being a (presumably) foreign corporation?
Kinda feels like putting a serial killer on trial when you don’t know who it is
More like an estimation of something stolen.
"We don't know who did it but when found they are liable for X€ of damage"
There are many alternative methods of service when you have an unknown defendant or a defendant that evades service, including service by publication.
Exactly. It's one step removed from convicting god for yesterday's weather.
Who's going to complain about not being served?
Funny picturing a wooden caravel full of books sailing around the Cape of Good Hope followed by a mega yacht full of lawyers.
> Last year, Libgen also told users that it's primarily funded through Google advertising. In the video, Libgen was warning users that while admins are difficult to unmask, "Google gets informed of every download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded, and when they downloaded it."
In my opinion, this seems like a particularly stupid risk to take as a pirate site. Ad networks would be in a prime position to dox all your users and, were the publishers so inclined, they could easily get that data and target your individual users for legal harassment.
Are the costs of running Libgen seriously that high that they have to defray them with advertising specifically?
It's factually wrong.
First, while Google aggregates lots of data for analytics and advertising, and if subpoenaed may be able to say that a given user visited a given pirate site, they only know the user opened pages -- not that they clicked a download link or successfully downloaded an ebook, because the ebook file itself contains no Google advertising.
It's not illegal to do a search on a pirate site. The only illegal part is the downloading, and ad networks don't have any record of that part.
It depends whether your goal is "to make information free" or "give away stolen goods to trick users into giving you their PII so you can monetize with internet ad bucks".
Just because you like what someone is doing in principle doesn't mean they're good people doing it for good reasons.
"UNESCO advocates for access to information as a fundamental freedom and a key pillar in building inclusive knowledge societies"
https://www.unesco.org/en/right-information
*But only for rich people in first world countries who can afford spending hundreds of dollars on overpriced textbooks.
If they can't collect from a specific person, "judgements" are just some pencil neck running around with a clipboard shouting randomly and freaking out.
> McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer...
Hilarious and sad typo. What a clown world we're living in, where the worthless AI-generated virtue-signaling drivel from LinkedIn is allowed to continue existing, but this vast trove of knowledge that's broadly useful for humanity is forced into the shadows.
[dupe]
Lots of discussion earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661512
I'm confused, admittedly my understanding of law is limited.
1. You can sue a person or corporation. (But e.g. you can't sue ""Antifa"" because that is neither.)
2. Incorporation involves named officers.
What am I missing?
In the case of this lawsuit they're suing unknown individuals. The case is Cengage Learning, Inc. v. Does 1-50. Apparently it's a US legal convention to just spitball the number of members of a group of unknown alleged coconspirators to 50.