On Thursday, some links to the notorious shadow library Library Genesis (Libgen) couldn’t be reached after a US district court judge, Colleen McMahon, ordered what TorrentFreak called “one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions” ever issued by a US court.
In her order, McMahon sided with textbook publishers who accused Libgen of willful copyright infringement after Libgen completely ignored their complaint.
To compensate rightsholders, McMahon ordered Libgen to pay $30 million, but because nobody knows who runs the shadow library, it seems unlikely that publishers will be paid any time soon, if ever.
Libgen helped me get my undergrad
Libgen and scihub have done more for science than any of those shitty journal publishers.
I cannot count the times that I have gone through the legitimate path to read a paper, by clicking “AcCeS tHiS pApEr ThRoUgH yOuR iNsTItUtIoN” and I log in through my university, faffing with 2FA, only to be told “nah, you don’t have access”. I just go straight to scihub nowadays.
Hell, a lot of the time I just go directly to Sci-Hub / Anna’s Archive because it’s literally faster than searching for my university and logging in.
Good for libgen. Fuck the police!
Lmfao get fucked, US copyright system.
And get fucked, Digital Millennium Copyright Act!
And while we’re at it, get fucked Pearson and other scummy textbook publishers!
in addition, fuck mosquitos 🦟🔥
Yea fuck mosquitos!
Yes. I am Look Skee Wacker, and I ride the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Falcon. Sure it’s kinda small and feathery but chewy and I love to ride it to new adventures! 😉
Is the dead falcon smell normal for falcons? Why doesn’t it fly when we jump on it… repeatedly? Is all the red stuff supposed to be inside of it? How do we put it all inside? It’s at lot. Well, it’s not a lot, it’s a falcon. I’m just referring to all the guts outside surrounding it.
Sometimes there’s a positive story that just makes your day. I bet those lawyers were expensive!
can’t libgen get around this by just saying they’re training an AI model?
And that it was curated by an AI model, so there’s no human to blame!
Knowledge should be free
Sure. But the folks who put the knowledge in a digestible format should be rewarded for their efforts.
Yep. Not the folks who create textbooks they force their students to buy for ludicrous prices so they can afford their fancy boat.
I’d happily pay $20-40ish for a quality textbook. I have many times before. It’s when they want to charge $300 and give almost nothing to the authors that I have a problem with. Extra scummy when they make a new edition that’s just barely different enough you can’t use it for class because the practice problems don’t match or give you one time use online codes that render it worthless for resale.
Publishers don’t do this fyi… they only rake in money and give nothing on the authors. They are the real pirates here.
With Universal Healthcare and a Universal Basic Income, no one would need to be “rewarded” for doing things that they find interesting, entertaining, or do simply for the sake of enriching society.
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Only if it is like $20 a month and encompasses all of your textbooks, but that will never happen
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Except literally nobody keeps their old textbooks they are by nature disposable, and not printing them is a massive win for the environment.
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That should be the goverments of the worlds problem.
unless you have a product that needs to feed off someone else’s labour to be somewhat useful, then you can use it for free legally without compensating anyonee
And you can have your freedom, for only the low low cost of 1200 dollars per freedom, per year.
Good.
I hope this causes libgen to create a thousand more mirrors.
Man I wonder how they set it up to where they don’t know who runs it
The index is distributed. The files are hosted in multiple places. Historically, some of the storage spots have been compromised web servers. There are copies in ipfs.
I get the feeling it’s maintained by a collective. No idea how they coordinate content acquisition or update indexes. It’s pretty well updated.
God bless that collective. Doing gods work
And how did they prove that anyone was served?
Common Libgen W.
Pirates: “Arr, hehe, yeah, we’ll send this right up the yardarm for ye.”
Only $30 million? For the amount of content and the convenience, Libgen seems to getting charged pennies on the dollar here. Imagine if the government could make a free online library of that quality for only $30 million, it would be a fantastic investment.
You served them. Just send the judgement there idiots. Lolololol
libgen.[redacted]
