U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction

ak_111

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 In fact even if you want to pay this much sometimes it is the only place to find an out of date scientific book (which I needed to do often in mathematics) that is not being published due to lack of demand while at the same time the publisher refuses to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.

musicale

> 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.

bityard

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?

ssalka

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.

mhh__

The really annoying thing is that libgen is often the only place one can actually get a book.

chimeracoder

> 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.

squigz

https://annas-archive.org/datasets/lgrs

musicale

> “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?

whimsicalism

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.

yieldcrv

> 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?

dang

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

dartharva

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.

enriquto

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.

kundi

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

BriggyDwiggs42

In a better world, the government would run something like libgen. That shit’s a public good.

lordnacho

So, how does it operate on a technical level?

rustcleaner

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?

uptownfunk

This is so messed up.

throwaway14356

51.5 TB non fiction pdfs has only 2TB of txt.

southernplaces7

The reason why LibGen no longer loads at all since yesterday, suddenly solved.

ang_cire

Damn, I'd better grab stuff now then! :D

trollied

"While this is a win on paper, it’s unlikely that the publishers will get paid by the LibGen operators, who remain anonymous."

ysofunny

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

6gvONxR4sf7o

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.

qwerty456127

LibGen is the most important achievement of humanity. It is much more important to keep it going than the most of sovereign countries.

dansitu

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.

mrkramer

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.

throawayonthe

[dead]

complianceowl

[flagged]

d13

Now, can someone help explain to me how I can ask LibGen (or Google, or my ISP) to refund me the thousands of dollars I’ve lost in royalties on the 7 books of mine they have up there?

https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Rex+van+der+spuy&lg_topic=l...

Google gave me link, searching my name turned them up.