https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923
Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits.
Hopefully this will encourage more people to go back to the original libgen. I suspect Z-library's popularity was because of a better interface and larger collection, but I think lots of people didn't realize libgen offers all its books/papers for free without limits.
We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at http://pilimi.org (we'll set up a patreon-like system soon)
I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it.
Something that,
- is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion)
- requires no power
- doesn't require software to read/reboot from
- (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years
A few copies for Earth. 2 or 3 for the Moon. And a few sent out of the solar system on probes like Voyager.
Voyager itself is a great example of what we could achieve. The golden records were made out of stable, inert materials and Voyager’s trajectory doesn’t intersect with any known object for billions of years. The records themselves will be intact for at least two billion years according to one estimate. They are, for all intents and purposes, functionally immortal parcels of information.
https://www.space.com/predicting-voyager-golden-records-dist...
Some simple math, if the pages could fit inside of a 10mm x 10mm square, then for a plate that's about the size of an average coffee table at 2' x 4', we could fit 7,432 pages.
Assuming that we have 50 billion pages, we'd need about 6.7 million such plates to fit all of human knowledge, so far.
It sounds crazy, but assuming we could get net costs per plate down to $500, each copy would be about $35M. Or, ~0.14% of an Uber. Alternatively, 0.002% of the F-35 program.
That's doable!
-
6.7 million plates will probably weigh a lot. So off-world copies might need to use an alternative encoding scheme.
Another problem is likely to be organization of the plates/copies. The hardest part might be putting it all together in a way that can be trivially decoded by human descendants, even if they don't speak our language or share our subspecies.
(apologies for any typos, it's very late at my end)
Rather I think you vastly underestimate what a billion years can do. The earth itself, and all that was on it, was formed a “few” billion years ago.
Our rivers alone have carved entire valleys into mountain ranges in much, much less time. I doubt a titanium alloy and some unspecified sort of super epoxy stand a chance.
And constant custody with regular restoration cannot be guaranteed for billions of years either.
That’s a massive problem for one plate (and its many copies) alone, more so for millions of unique plates…
The Long Now Foundation is only shooting for 10000 years, as far as I know.
The earth will be uninhabitable in that time frame due to changes in the atmosphere and beyond that the sun itself will complete it's lifecycle.
I know there's a big fad to "just believe" in a SF future that spans space and time but physical realities in this area are pretty rough.
I think the best thing people could do is realise that, eventually, everything ends and believing otherwise when it comes to the human race is much like believing in an afterlife.
For the Moon and Mars, carve them into stone there. You'll have to defend against meteor strikes so they'll be carved and stored deep underground. No idea about seismic activity on those bodies.
For outer space, maybe it's pointless because finding, boarding, unloading an interstellar probe and sending the cargo back home is not easy unless you have very advanced interstellar ships. An orbit around the sun could be an easier place to spot. The Library of Ceres or the Library of the Troians?
Just don't make them look gold (even if they're not solid gold), or they'll get looted and melted.
Though it would be fun if a murderous warlord ended up with a gotten crown made of the Wikipedia article for toilet paper orientation. [1]
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5D_optical_data_storage
5d is a bit dramatic but it is a femtosecond laser writing of quartz crystal that should, in theory, be stable for billions of years and can hold hundreds of terabytes.
Seems to be just what is needed.
The main issue would be loss of language. You’d end up with a gigantic Rosetta Stone of indecipherable gibberish.
Better would be to convert all literature into hieroglyphics, or graphic novels (or both), and then etch them microscopically.
And I'm over here hoping humanity extinguishes itself ASAP so the rest of life can thrive before we kill it all.
Intelligent life seems highly overrated.
https://www.regulations.gov/comment/USTR-2022-0010-0024 https://www.regulations.gov/comment/USTR-2022-0010-0015
> Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits.
What is the difference between what "z-library" was doing, which was "you download a lot for free, but if you need more, just pay us, because no internet bandwith is for free" from donations? I always understood the subscription at z-library as support, not different than patreon...
Their policy was basically around discouraging datahoarders and scrapers as far as I could tell. If I recall correctly, the limit was something like 10 e-books per day per ip address. Not really a huge limit when you consider that there was no limit on file size for things like graphic novels. They never required accounts, and the only thing locked behind a required donation was compute intense tasks like conversion, and send-to-kindle.
The kind of bandwidth/storage that they had to be consuming is quite expensive and I don't blame the organizers for soliciting donations.
That's a silly policy in a world of shared VPN endpoints and Tor exit nodes.
Ick.
I'm sympathetic to piracy, but the moment people start to make money off of pirated works it starts to feel much more wrong.
>Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription)<
That's a lie mixed with some truth. They have a download limit yes, but one that resets every 24 hours. You can download free 5 books even without an account, and with an account 10 and even more if you used the telegram bot. Like other user mentioned, that policy probaly was to discourage datahoarders and scrapers. And if you donated to the project you recieved the benefit of being able to download more books per day.
"Piracy" is expensive! Most people do not donate to support these things it's understandable if they decide to charge a few cents or bucks to keep the light on.
But great advice and the route I've personally taken :)
If you're in the United States, electricity is cheap enough that you can pick up much older SAS drives for really low $/TB cost and have it be worthwhile.
For example, I bought a used Supermicro CSE-836 [1], which is like a 3U server chassis with 16 hot-swappable drive bays and a backplane of some sort.
The backplanes vary, but mine came with the BPN-SAS2-836EL1. I paid $300 in total for the chassis itself, backplane, dual power supplies, heatsinks, etc, along with a Supermicro X9DRi-LN4F+ [2] and two Xeon E5 2660 V2s as a bundle from someone in the 'ServeTheHome' classifieds section [3]. From there, I picked up a load of HGST 3TB 7200rpm SAS2 drives on eBay for about $10 each from a recycling company. And then 192GB of DDR3 ECC memory from the same place for about $80.
I also grabbed a couple less-than-production-ready 3.84TB U.2 NVMe drives on eBay for a little over $100 each.
I think if I were to do it again, I'd have gotten slightly larger, newer drives. These are all totally fine, but I started seeing ~6TB drives for about 3x the cost per terabyte, which would pay itself off quickly with the energy reduction. The other reason is that I ended up going a little overboard; I have about 56x3TB drives right now, which is a lot more than 16, so I needed to get a couple of JBOD expansions to put them in, each of which were like $250 -- if I had gotten fewer, larger drives, I'd have had another $500 to work with & be saving on energy.
Another thing I'd have done differently is get fewer but larger sticks of memory. I have a really nice amount of RAM right now, but the energy consumption with 24x8GB isn't worth the upfront savings compared to getting 16 or 32GB DIMMs.
All the storage is in OpenZFS on Linux. The 56x3TB drives are configured as 7 RAIDZ2 vdevs, so 2 drives each are for redundancy, and 6 for actual usable storage. This leaves me with a bit over 100TB of usable space. And the 3.84TB U.2 drives are mirrored and act as a "special" device (lol, literally what they are called) [4] to automatically store small blocks and ZFS metadata.
I am sure I could have done a bunch better, but, so far, everything has been lightning fast and reliable.
I am using ZFSBootMenu [5] as my bootloader. It's cool since it is basically a tiny Linux distro that lives in your EFI and comes with a recent version of ZFS, so you can store your entire OS, including your actual kernel and such in ZFS, and you can enable all sorts of ZFS features that GRUB doesn't support, etc.
This is nice because, since the entire OS is living in ZFS, when I take snapshots, it is always of a bootable, working state, and ZFSBootMenu lets me roll-back to a selected snapshot from within the bootloader.
The Supermicro board has a slot for a SATA DOM [6], which is sort of like the form fact of an SD card. I picked up the smallest, cheapest one I could on eBay for like $15 and use that to store my bootloader. I did this so that my tiny 128GB SSDs that I use for my OS could be given to ZFS directly for simplicity instead of having to carve out a small boot partition, etc.
All in all, I'm probably out about $1750 for >100TB usable, redundant, fast storage, and a decent bit of power for virtualization and whatever else. It costs me like $50ish a month in electricity because of all the drives and DIMMs. But I was already paying 65 euros a month for a 4x8TB server from LeaseWeb to use as a seedbox, and ran out of space, so it's been worth it, even with my dumb decision to use 3TB drives.
[1]: <https://www.supermicro.com/en/products/chassis/3u/836/sc836b...>
[2]: <https://www.supermicro.com/products/archive/motherboard/x9dr...>
[3]: <https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?forums/for-sale-fo...>
[4]: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI4SnKAP6cQ>
[5]: <https://zfsbootmenu.org>
[6]: <https://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/SATADOM.cfm>
---
Edit: Also, figured it'd be worth mentioning, but the way I got the chassis+motherboard+cpu bundle for such a decent price was by posting my own thread. So, if anyone reading this is broke like me and not finding anything suitable, that is an option.
You won't always find exactly what you're looking for if you just browse around. But I've always had good luck explaining my situation, my budget, my goals, and someone tends to have stuff they don't need.
eBay seems to be pretty useless right now for the chassises (chasses? chassi? I give up) due to memecoin Chia miners. Forums are your best bet if you don't want to pay scalper rates.
I'm not sure if this is something you're doing already, but don't forget that if you zfs send a snapshot to your storage pool, you can boot from that snapshot in a pinch.
We also (this past week) added a modifier to zbm.prefer - !!. If you specify zbm.prefer=zroot!! on the KCL, it'll only import the zroot pool. This might help your boot times by skipping importing your 56 drive storage pool.
We should have a new release out in the next few weeks, otherwise that feature is in the master branch if you build your own EFI executable.
I'd encourage you to write more of this technical content!
Man, even enterprise servers, sold directly to data centers, max out these devices at 64 gigabytes. Many are offered with a pair of 32GB SLC old-school SSDs (for the extra durability).
Using 3.84TB for this is an enormous waste unless you host half the GitHub yourself and have specified "all files under this or that size go to the special devices".
Better make a torrent or book or comics mirror or something on this pair of huge SSDs. I use a pair of 32GB extra-durable (SLC) USB pen drives for special/metadata on a fairly decent ZFS dataset (~9TB) and they have something like 4MB of taken space...
Have you put a power meter on that setup? I've always wanted to do something like this but electricity here is AU$0.27/kWh, and my house is poorly oriented for solar panels unfortunately.
Actually, aren't they already using that?
Practically speaking, if you are in the US, you could download stuff from zlib and get away with it - I believe that's not illegal. Hosting on the other hand is.
Using torrents to download is legally also hosting, albeit some random parts of what you are downloading yourself. So to stay legal in the US, you can't really use torrents.
Maybe some enterprising person in Russia or China can become a reseller of hard drives and preload them with chunks of libgen ?
I mean, it's sad that the greatest country on earth has a sneakernet gap with Cuba [1]! ;)
I want to purchase ebooks, but I want to own what I purchase!
Oreilly books had drm free copies you could buy. Some good deals (buy 2 get 2 free) They moved to a drm based subscription model, but because the books I bought were drm free I still can access them!
Manning still does this. (Thoug they embed your email address in the pages of the pdfs you download. I’m ok with that). They market drm free as a feature, and I look there first when looking for tech books.
“What is Manning's DRM policy? What security restrictions are enabled on the PDF eBooks? Can I print, copy and paste, etc?
Manning eBooks are DRM-free. We do personalize each eBook with a license stamp in the footer of the PDF. There are no print or copy & paste restrictions on the PDF eBooks. You can also download your eBook as many times as you want, and put it on as many devices as you wish.”
It's still limited to applications that explicitly support it. Maybe there will be a wider ecosystem than Adobe's. But my current preferred reader apps all either have built-in storefronts (Kindle, Apple Books) or are open source (Calibre and Google Chrome, so I can use a Japanese dictionary extension). The former category probably won't ever support LCP, and the latter category definitely won't.
And as for longevity… who's to say LCP will still be around in 10 years or 20? At least Adobe has a big brand name.
At the end of the day, I'll keep using de-DRM plugins to get around those problems, but that's a solution that only works for people who are relatively tech savvy, not your average reader. And I'm not sure DRM will always be as ineffective as it is today.
As for LCP being around in 10-20 yrs, the idea with LCP (excluding loans, of course) is that you don't need to be online or require a remote server to validate/access ebooks you've downloaded. You just have your "password", that is used to decrypt the book content through LCP, so as long as you still have any app that supports LCP, you still have access to the publication. I think it's the best compromise that will exist in reality for publishers that still want DRM. The entire system is open-source except a small key derivation function.
- you can only read them in [publisher-approved apps]
- you can't share them with your kids
- you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow
Does LCP solve any of these problems?
Without a DRM mechanism it can be easily shared on warez sites. They really don't want books easily disseminated DRM free on warez sites. Alongside this they can track what pages you read and even know how 'fast' you are at reading. Welcome to 1984.
DRM doesn't seem to be very good at preventing this either, though. The only thing it's really good at is making it harder for legitimate users to access their legally purchased media.
There is an inherent asymmetry to it: It only takes one sophisticated bad actor to break DRM and make a cracked book widely available, yet legitimate users not willing to break the law are suffering the inconveniences of error-prone, user-hostile systems.
I can even somewhat empathize with the idea of DRM for subscriptions or loans (otherwise there is really no incentive for users to continue paying, and durable access is not a concern either), but for outright purchased media, it really rubs me the wrong way to know that I can lose access to my stuff at any time.
It worked like this for music (Spotify and Apple Music have DRM, but iTunes and Amazon MP3/AAC purchases haven't, for example), and it's even working for eBooks in some countries: German language ePubs have been DRM free for some years now (although watermarked).
Every time a publisher mentions this to me, they look surprised when I tell them their books are already easily shared on warez sites. Complex DRM schemes, especially Adobe, limit innovation in reading applications and cause all sorts of end user issues. This in turns pushes people to find sites like zlib in the first place.
Does anyone do this? I don't see how it's relevant beyond "wow! you reading speed increased 5% this month" in emails from the Kindle service. Maybe they target ads for "read better and faster in 90 days" if you're in the 10th percentile on reading speed?
It could also be sold to publishers as part of a tool to determine the above prior to publishing; what if books were optimized for your attention?
Pleasant or not, there are plenty of uses for the data.
They can also see the things that you highlight, the things that you reread. This could be used to profile the reader and personalize ads
not only this, but being forced to buy an ebook through their portal, they'll know everything you're reading. Whereas you could read pdfs anonymously if you wanted
https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201541130
> A customer can read your eBook as many times as they like, but we will only pay you for the number of pages read the first time the customer reads them.
Warez sites often link to more than just software. Software may or may not be the primary focus. Terminology evolves.
Tor Publishing Group
Release Date: August 31, 2010
Imprint: Tor Books
ISBN: 9781429992800
Language: English
Download options: EPUB 3 (DRM-Free)
Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to explicitly search for DRM-free titles, but the description for these usually has a sentence like "made available DRM-free at the publisher's request", or is lacking the reference to "use limited to x devices simultaneously".
Removing Kobo's DRM or the Adobe version is pretty trivial too and doesn't seem to change as much as Amazon's.
But they don't support Kindle because Kindle doesn't support ePubs and Adobe DRM'd ePubs at that.
I think it can even read MOBI though, i vaguely remember accidentally uploading some to my kobo without converting and reading them before i realized the conversion step was missed.
The "ebook shops" are the worst. Amazon & Apple have their DRM'd copies, and Kobo may be even worse.
[Edit: tor books, not the other tor. Although presumably everything is there regardless of legal status]
The notable exception is Amazon: Kindle books are almost always DRMed from the same publishers.
I recently bought these two (in DRM-free PDF and EPUB), mostly-happily paying twice what I'd have to for paperback or being locked to a jerky-reader:
* https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/210313783/programming-rust... ($60; for experienced systems programmers, this seems better than the free official book)
* https://www.ebooks.com/en-us/book/209970024/software-enginee... ($51; for front-loading Googliness)
I used ZLibrary to download e-books of books that I could only find in some crappy format (including physical). I use game-pirating sites the same way. I already purchased Secret of Mana-- why shouldn't I just re-download it?
I have a Kobo, and its store is woefully lacking (would get a Kindle if I could go back in time). So, what I do is buy the book wherever I can find it cheapest, then chuck it and pirate an e-version of it. That way, my weird conscience thinks it's OK, and I have it in the format I desire.
The entire content distribution system for all forms of media (and a lot of software) is pretty broken.
> you are guaranteed to lose access to them in 10 years or tomorrow
What do they have to do with ebooks??
I think legally they can investigate whatever (alleged) crimes they want – subject to the outcome of any turf wars with other government agencies. Their official purpose may be to investigate one particular category of crimes, but it is unlikely any court is going to throw out a prosecution because the "wrong" agency gathered the evidence. Government agencies are frequently trying to expand their empires, move into new areas, prove their continuing relevance when faced with technological changes that undermine their original reason for existence.
At the extreme, you end up with agencies whose names are purely historical and have nothing to do with their current functions. A good example of that is the Railroad Commission of Texas, which no longer has anything to do with railroads–now it is the Texas state regulator for the oil and gas industry (and also surface mining for coal and uranium). I don't know why they don't just change their name to "Texas Oil and Gas Commission" or something like that. One reason, of course, is that they don't actually control their own name, the Texas State Legislature does, and it seems it likes their name just the way it is.
Also, even supposing a criminal investigation was in violation of the appropriations laws (money appropriated to investigate one type of crime being illegally redirected to investigate another type of crime instead), that (as far as I know–IANAL) isn't an issue the accused has standing to raise in court.
A (possibly) real example of this happened under the Clinton and Obama administrations, when Republicans in Congress tried to appropriate money specifically to prosecute adult pornography, and the Justice Department (allegedly) illegally spent a lot of it on child pornography prosecutions instead. But even supposing the allegation is true, it was of no legal benefit to the accused.
I haven't seen the court filings yet, but I guess that a unauthorized (by the publisher) physical reproduction of a book (that was domestically sent through USPS, otherwise it'll be under US CBP) that just so happens that the source for the PDF used for the physical reproduction is from Z-Library.
It essentially acted like an in-person bookstore for me that allowed me to browse a book to determine whether it was worth buying.
Before z-lib, I generally tended toward avoiding wasting money. I guess I’m back to that again.
(I like paper copies of tech books and Kindle copies of novels so I can sync reading and highlights between devices)
It's weird how many I've grabbed look like they were native EPUBs at first glance, but the repeated typos that no human would make betrays that they were sourced from OCRs.
There are plenty of other sites to find books to skim before buying.
I use this mechanism as my "shopping cart" where I just freely download samples of books that seem even slightly interesting. Later I can browse through my backlog, start reading, and either file it away for later, buy it, or delete it if it's clear that it's not for me.
IMHO the latter only legitimately applies where the comparison is tangential/apples to oranges, or if "two wrongs don't make a right" is being argued.
In the 'western' world piracy is a dubiously moral way to save money, and employed people can access the work by saving or doing a little more work like visiting a library.
But the copyright system prohibits much of the world from gaining knowledge and participating in culture. Over 1.9 billion people, or 26.2 percent of the world’s population, were living on less than $3.20 per day in 2015. This is not a particularly moral situation, and piracy directly addresses it at the expense of the western world's property rights.
Article 19:
"freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers"
Universal library access over the internet seems to qualify.
Article 17:
"Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property."
Says nothing about "intellectual property".
Article 23:
"Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection."
Doesn't ban libraries, but says that authors have a right to fair pay.
Update:
The z-library wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-Library) lists the following zlib onion domain which doesn't require a login:
zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion
Nice try, I guess :/
(can someone explain to me why every site in the world will redirect mobile browsers to a limited page but won't redirect desktop browsers back to the full featured version?)
What do they have to do with ebooks???
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_submachine_gun#Early_...
(The Post Office was established in colonial times by Benjamin Franklin, the USPSIS precursor was formed in 1772.)
The Pirate Library Mirror (your second link) is a complete archive of Z-Library, though it's a bulk archive of several TB and not readily accessed for individual titles. The PLM is intended as a tool for building archives rather than as a direct source itself.
(The pilimi.org link itself explains much of this.)
You need to be in good physical shape, willing to work a minimum of 50 hours a week including irregular hours, be on call 24/7, and of course also not only carry a firearm but be willing to use deadly force.
I'm sure they were flooded with applicants.
It is quite ironic considering who really ab/uses the legal monopoly of force to rob others of their copies.
https://www.usa.gov/federal-agencies
Some weird ones are there for sure.
The lesson is: more tor, more IPFS, DHT, encryption, federated protocols, mesh networks, and P2P in general.
This contest of power is one of the very few the People have any hope of winning.
Z Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29365627 - Nov 2021 (36 comments)
Zshelf: Z-Library books downloader for reMarkable tablet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26355778 - March 2021 (51 comments)
yeah it's not ideal but, there might be quite some readers pay if they know how to do that easily.
I wonder if this is related.
Boy, wouldn't that be nice. A standard calculus book costs $200 in America. Or, £178 (RIP pounds)
That really stung.
Am a pretentious whiner?, Yes. Will I keep on pirating textbooks? Yes
zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion
I can get college lectures at various levels for free, I can get a variety of interactive programs for free (or make them myself). Not to mention for a lot of the classes I've had, the textbook was not necessary at all - but I was dumb enough to buy a couple before I got wise.
They have a market cornered and it's bullshit and their service is repugnant, they need the air taken out of them.
I can't believe that societies allow education to be so profit-driven and motivated. It's so blatantly classist.
No thanks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/battle-over-c...
also, it is def not "reasonable" to repeatedly re-release editions just to make old ones useless.
i usually enjoy reading the $40 upper level ones a lot more btw.
EDIT - don't bump this. Why would you need an account to download pirated shit? LOL absolutely pathetic.
> .cc is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, an Australian territory. It is administered by a United States company, VeriSign, through a subsidiary company, eNIC, which promotes it for international registration as "the next .com".
And at least in Canada, doesn’t show any seizure notice.
edit: found it! cool!
> .lat is an Internet generic top-level domain (gTLD) for Latin American communities and users wherever they may reside.
What is interesting is that this does not appear to be a Verisign operated domain. The operator appears to be based entirely outside the US. I wonder how difficult it was to seize the domain.
A quick search turns up some related discussion from the EFF, though not precisely answering your question:
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/03/if-government-cant-get...>
The site can't be reached with a bare IP
z-lib.org 66.212.148.115
www.z-lib.org 66.212.148.115
ns1.seizedservers.com hostmaster@seizedservers.comWorks just like libgen and is getting larger over time.
<https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-authorities-seize-z-library-dom...>
http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52...
https://blog.cpanel.com/what-is-a-decentralized-domain-name-...
Why about ex presidents obama and clinton ?
http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52... and http://loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhem...
all the clearnet addresses are dead.
It seems like ZLib was seized mainly because they started running donation drives and potentially earning money on piracy, although that's just conjecture. Libgen does not do any such thing.
Especially on HN, where I think a lot of our livelihoods depend on writing and charging for closed source code that can technically be infinitely distributed.
How many of us would be happy to open source all our code, provide easy ways for people to download and deploy, and then leave a PayPal link in the footer asking for donations? Why should authors be any different?
For non-academic books, I don't know how things works, maybe there is a mechanism where the author can gain revenue from selling books. So I always pay for them and the priated copy I downloaded is just for archival.
People move to piracy due to lack of affordability and options.
I am from one of those countries where we pretty much cannot afford "legal" content. In my shitty town the median salary is something like $300, at least half of which goes towards paying rent if you don't have your own house, while we're being asked to pay prices that were established for developed countries with median salaries at 10× of ours or above.
Steam is one of very few exceptions and it's really popular here even among students and such (just like everywhere else).
Basically, if you want to charge me $50 for the book, you're not losing anything, simply because I cannot afford it anyway. Imagine if you had to pay $500 for books, $600 for movies, etc.
For example, The Pragmatic Programmer costs $10 in Indian stores, while it costs $50 in US.
Not making a moral judgement, just adding color.
If you feel bad about privacy, pay a random author half the Amazon price of your library and you’ll be a better person than somebody who meekishly shovels Bezos a ton of money in misguided morality. One that makes reading an exclusive right of the wealthy.
I would, as, in most cases, code alone doesn't really make money.
Less obvious but just as relevant would be Snowflake, Clickup, etc letting me just deploy and host their software in our data center instead of relying on their cloud.
I work at a large national library and teach at a university, so have to deal with copyright issues every day. Everyone agrees copyright is broken.
I release all my personal code under MIT license, and if someone does want to violate that license by not attributing me I am completely fine with that.
This is typical strawman stuff.
I want a book; I don't want to pay for it; so I pirate it.
And then I go about my day without ever thinking about it again.
The relationship between physical book checkouts and author/publisher revenue is less direct, but the ebook contracts are an attempt to emulate decay and damage to physical books that require periodic repurchases. Arguably you are hastening the end of a physical book's life and its need to be repurchased, or need to stock more copies, by checking it out.
Please don't misunderstand my explanation to be an endorsement of standard ebook lending contracts.
If 100 people all try to check it out, there would be a huge waiting list and the library would try to order more copies.
I pirate all my books btw, just saying if everyone did it ofc there'd be(already is) impact. Easily smartphones+kindle is worse though.
For this to work what is needed is a blanket license for search and snippet use. Can't buy a whole library for such a sparse use case, ain't gonna read it in the classical sense. This approach can guarantee the generated text will not replicate the source material, just use it for reference, with citations.
- DeepMind RETRO - https://www.deepmind.com/publications/improving-language-mod...
In the digital age, why not cut out the middle man? Have a publicly funded e-library that pays authors directly based on how often their content is downloaded.
You can't just arbitrarily decide that only one party "deserves" to make money from the book, and doing so would probably lead to a lawsuit.
[not related to OP] I have a similar feeling every time someone moralizes in any discussion: we could argue about morality, but we need to start with a common moral framework and define what "good" and "bad" are first. Everyone assumes these are generally agreed upon but the devil is in the details when discussing something like the OP.
Don’t outlaw libraries just because the internet now exists or legalize them but only with absurdities like fucking wait lists.
Three copies, for the a metropolis of several million. :)
It is a bit ridiculous that "buying copies" and then imposing artificial scarcity on these is the best mechanism that libraries and publishers have figured out to compensate content producers, but I'm optimistic that they'll eventually figure something out.
Perhaps more importantly, the cost of books in libraries is not assigned based on the number of books checked out or read. It tends to be people in lower and lower-middle economic classes who use libraries more, even while they pay less than the per-capita average cost to keep those libraries running and their shelves stocked.
Libraries are communist entities. Even worse than that, from a capitalist perspective, although checking out books requires you to be connected with the tax base or funding source for the library, you can generally go to any public or academic library and read books on-site even if you're from another country or planet and aren't entitled to check anything out.
I don't think copyright has a future, the general trend is against it. Graphical artists have already realised it only takes a second to imitate any style or content. What's the point of copyrighting a book when anyone can generate any text just for their own use, when it's so cheap and fast we throw away the result after one use?
Also, as a lawyer, couldn't you come up with some a decent counterargument re moral differences, if you had to?
I think people who know it's stealing, but are willing to download books anyway because of their personal risk/reward calculation (or perhaps they dislike the author and don't mind stealing from him!), have an intact moral compass: They know right from wrong.
I wonder about people who try to rationalize the crime of book-stealing away. Do they know right from wrong?
I won't judge people who decide to steal books, but I don't like those who try to argue it's not theft.
Stealing/theft is best thought of not as "getting a thing for free that you're not entitled to" -- it's "depriving someone of their property," which copying ain't.
Grazie