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libgen and z-library must be Russia's greatest philanthropic contribution to the rest of mankind (despite all the other dodgy stuff it is involved in, which I am not belittling).

It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view: knock out a hugely profitable business (textbook publishing) of you adversary while increasing your soft power by 100x due to the unpopularity of said industry.

There are surely loads of artists and independent technical authors who got screwed by it which I am not diminishing, but this is more than dwarfed by the benefit to the hundred of millions around the world especially from developing countries who can't afford to pay $100+ for a textbook on essential topic like organic chemistry or electrical engineering. In fact even if you want to pay this much sometimes it is the only place to find an out of date scientific book (which I needed to do often in mathematics) that is not being published due to lack of demand while at the same time the publisher refuses to submit the book to the open domain.

While the founders may have their origins in the Soviet Union (and not Russian), I don’t think the site has anything todo with the Russian government. Rather, it’s the reaction of some individuals to the difficult and expensive access to literature in the west.
I think you’re overstating how much anyone knows or cares that Libgen is Russian (if that is a correct categorization). Also, as you imply, the hurt to publishers may be overstated - a download is not a lost sale.
My wife would not be able to do her PhD without LibGen

People don’t understand how hard and expensive it is to legitimately access research articles if you’re from a developing poor country

I don't think it was a strategic move any more than scihub (also originating in Russia) was

Also, IRC channels with many thousands of textbooks have been around for decades (and have nothing to do with Russia)

people overestimate the capabilities of the corrupt russian government to an absurd degree. Piracy is rampant in russia because it s not suppressed there. VK is full of all the movies you can think of.
> It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view:

Why elevate what is likely the work of a few committed private individuals to the level of some strategic state conspiracy?

PDFs also have a scripting language built in, right? Could that be a good attack vector?

It seems like a pretty good site to attack people from, for social reasons. It sits at a nice confluence of: technically unauthorized copying, but feels like not such a big deal. And getting academic papers can be a PITA. And the audience is probably self-selecting for folks who are doing interesting STEM stuff.

Libgen is Russian?
American's still very much buy into the super-villain complex regarding Russia drilled into them over the decades.

Yes, Putin does all kind of shit, but this ... please, the national security interest card from copyright holders has been an evergreen.

I love that this perspective completely misses the point in the light of GenAI, the greatest appropriation of all human creation by large american tech companies, destroying untold commercialisation.

Can't have one discusson without the other.

> Hoping for a better outcome, textbook publishers Cengage, Bedford, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education

The same companies pushing subscription models, restrictive e-book licensing, bundling, single-use codes, needless revisions, and anything else they can do to eliminate the first sale doctrine (and with it third party used textbook sales and rentals) and extract more money from students.

On the modern internet, you don't need to know who runs it in order to shut it down. They already have a court order to pull down all of the known domains and the registrars have 20 days to comply.

If that doesn't work, many countries have systems in place where copyright holders can tell ISPs not to let their customers access certain links. (Either via blocking DNS requests or null-routing the IP/netblock.)

Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?

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.

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.

Even if they get the whole site taken down, I'm pretty sure whoever operates it can just deploy the same thing to any number of other domains. The actual server infrastructure would need to be taken offline, which it sounds like they don't have enough information to do.
The really annoying thing is that libgen is often the only place one can actually get a book.
> 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."

This seems like... a bad plan if your goal is to run a website whose primary purpose is not entirely legal.

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?
They typoed libgen for linkedin in the article

> n the order, McMahon gave registrars of LinkedIn domains 21 business days to either transfer domains to publishers' control or "otherwise implement technical measures, such as holding, suspending, or canceling the domain name to ensure the domain names cannot be used" for further copyright infringement.

Funny picturing a wooden caravel full of books sailing around the Cape of Good Hope followed by a mega yacht full of lawyers.
> “Plaintiffs have been irreparably harmed as a result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct and will continue to be irreparably harmed should Defendants be allowed to continue operating the Libgen Sites”, the order reads.

What is the evidence?

"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.

> The lawsuit was stalled for months because LibGen’s anonymous operators didn’t respond. With no other viable options left, the publishers filed a motion for a default judgment in their favor.

Narrator: and LibGen’s anonymous operators still didn’t respond

The domain name injunction is interesting, but they want IPFS gateways to comply too, thats odd

but a direct IPFS hash would work, are there any browser extensions that resolve ipfs:// URIs?

Url changed from https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-m..., which points to this.

Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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?

Is there any way for us individuals to help libgen? Some sort of ipfs distributed storage? It would be a tragedy if it was lost. It's an essential resource for scientists and for bibliophiles!

I've recently stopped buying books from publishers that engage in this shitfuckery (Elsevier, Springer, etc). This frees almost 1000 EUR/year that I'd love to steer towards libgen, sci-hub and similar initiatives. But not for paying these stupid fines, of course.

I am connecting from India and I already can't access the original libgen sites (libgen.rs, libgen.st). Indian ISPs waste no time in blocking websites at the first indication, even when the people requesting have no jurisdiction on them.
> 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.

It's disappointing to see how they cannot see what it means for libgen to exist in the broader sense.

Books should be free for all, and we should encourage and educate people to donate back the value they received from them

In a better world, the government would run something like libgen. That shit’s a public good.
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.
So, how does it operate on a technical level?
Boy I hope the court is completely impotent to actually enforce anything in this case.

Why are we not slipping onion support into Hyphanet's opennet and just uploading library genesis to that?

This is so messed up.
51.5 TB non fiction pdfs has only 2TB of txt.
Damn, I'd better grab stuff now then! :D
The reason why LibGen no longer loads at all since yesterday, suddenly solved.
Works fine in Europe so far.
"While this is a win on paper, it’s unlikely that the publishers will get paid by the LibGen operators, who remain anonymous."
it's a real problem that will not be solved by trying to apply current laws

digital assets which don't suck under capitalism require real innovation from the government or, if that doesn't work, the people themselves

So making libgen is illegal, but using it to train LLMs is legal? I know there's a whole issue of transitive liability (maybe you couldn't know you were getting an illegal thing from the thief, so it doesn't always make sense for you to to be liable too), but this kind of thing seems to power way too much of my industry for me to be comfortable.
LibGen is the most important achievement of humanity. It is much more important to keep it going than the most of sovereign countries.
> 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?

Armchair anarchists aside, it's galling to see the work my co-authors, editors, designers, illustrators, translators, and reviewers poured months of our lives into available for free on this site.

Money is rarely an incentive for writing a textbook, but it's certainly important for the brilliant and under-appreciated people who work in publishing, maintaining the fragile existence of our greatest technology: the book.

Is there a legal alternative to illegal projects like Libgen? I would really really want something like Netflix for books, where I can easily discover and read books.