There were worse "burns" than this. 1M books is now fairly easily obtainable over a 6 month obsessive hunt on the Internet.<p>The real Library Of Alexandria - of Music - was shut down, WHAT.CD . The way everything there was curated, level of quality and global community, is hard to describe, grasp and convey here.<p>It was so good that artists, released their stuff there, first. For free, to get coverage, and it worked.
The damage done to human culture by our current copyright enforcement regime is heartbreaking.<p>We have to means to make human cultural output accessible to unprecedented numbers of people around the world, but we don't, largely because it would interrupt the flow of money to incumbent rent-seekers.
The article claims: "There is no legal nor illegal alternative to it as of today."<p>That is absolutely not true. Libgen and Scihub have
been with us for years, massively eclipse library.nu on content, and do not seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Moreover a cursory look over their operational TTPs definitely shows competence and familiarity with best practices (unlike library.nu) which I guess explains why they're still going strong.
I hope somebody has backed everything up and would eventually upload to alternative places. I actually wonder why don't people open the websites like that one in i2p or TOR.
The article makes many lofty claims about how knowledge must be free, but how can books continue to be put out if you disincentivize the authors? What's in it for them? Had I been an expert on a niche technical or academic subject in the eighties or nineties I might have published a book on it. These days, certainly not.
What is the difference between libgen.io and b-ok.org? They both seem to be in the Library Genesis family yet not just mirrors of each other -- for example, there are some books that I can find on b-ok.org but not by libgen.io.
Were the contents turned into what is now Scihub? Or put in a torrent that currently has seeders?<p>If the answer to both questions is "no" then the md5 of my response is 0646520533421d268d918384b0980da6
Downloading books and articles from libgen is technically "theft of intellectual property". So is torrenting proprietary software, music, etc.<p>I'm often surprised to observe the extent to which Americans, both inside and outside of academia, and regardless of their station in life, overtly engage in this form of 'IP theft', given how much anger there is these days at China for alleged IP theft (I'm granting for the sake of argument that the allegations are fully accurate).<p>Why don't Americans find this form of 'IP theft' equally ethically problematic? I suspect the answer is some combination of:<p>(i) deep down people don't really feel that 'big evil publishers' like Springer, Kluwer etc really deserve all that money; we are less likely to feel bad about 'stealing' from someone if we don't feel that the person from whom we are taking the thing away is morally entitled to it.<p>(ii) $30 per article etc is just too expensive and impractical. Paying is not a consistently followable policy, so we may as well consistent pirate.<p>To the extent that 'Chinese theft of intellectual property' occurs, can it be attributed to the same motivations?<p>Some analogue of (i) arguably obtains. After all, Americans committed two of the biggest thefts in human history: first the entire continent stolen from the natives, then, entire human lives stolen from generations of black people. So much of America's present-day prosperity and advantage can be chalked up to these two egregious acts of theft, neither of which they have remotely adequately compensated for. Obviously you can't return something you stole from some person (people) if you killed him (most of them). And the idea of reparation for slavery has never gained mainstream acceptance. The example this sets is "let's steal with abandon, after all our descedents can play the 'I was no part of that' defense just like present-day Americans".<p>As for (ii), I'm not entirely sure. Has anyone ever looked into just how much money a Chinese company would have to pay if it were to fully comply with intellectual property laws? I find it hard to imagine it <i>not</i> being just as exhorbitant as Springer, Kluwer etc, in many cases.