Those who have been in the Technotronic band for two decades Pump up the jam If they had been downloaded from Napster or stolen Scandinavian comedies via torrent files, they probably would have accepted in disbelief that illegal libraries would be the main battleground for digital piracy in the 2020s.
However, the situation is such that a group of specialist textbook publishers, including Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education, are accusing it of serious copyright infringement and have filed a lawsuit against the largest shadow library, Library Genesis, also known as Libgen for short.
Library Genesis began in Russia in 2008 and focused primarily on domestic publications, and its collection was later expanded to include half a million English-language volumes and currently consists of about six million files.
Libgen, run by unknown people in an unknown location, has made twenty thousand books by publishers going to court available for free download, according to them.
It is the most well-known and widespread copyright infringement organization today.
Because banknotes are usually expensive, the damage caused so far is estimated at about $30 million.
The publishers are now demanding an end to the infringement, the forfeiture of revenue, the deletion of all copies, and the surrender or deletion of Libgen’s web addresses. In the indictment, data from “Slikeweb” was cited, according to which 9 million people from the United States alone visited the shadow library of social networking sites every month. Instead of paying publishers, Libgen displayed various ads on its pages promoting online games and browser extensions, sometimes directing users to malware. Libgen also collected donations from users, taking in $182,540 worth of cryptocurrency in 2023 alone.
Publishers believe the anonymous individuals running Libgen are foreign, but the companies behind the service are American, such as Cloudflare, Protocol Labs, Namecheap and Google.
This is not the first time that adversaries have attacked the Shadow Library. Elsevier had already sued them in 2015, at that time
The service disappeared for a while, but quickly returned.
And of course it is still available today, despite US, Belgian, French, German, Greek, Italian and British court decisions.
The results of the US move against shadow libraries show a mixed picture so far. Last year, Russian Z-Library operators, Anaton Napolsky and Valeria Ermakov, were arrested in Argentina and 250 web addresses for their service were deleted. Despite this, Z-Library continued to operate a few months later with 11 million e-books.
The issue of shadow libraries is not only a copyright problem on the Internet, but it also affects the development of the biggest contemporary gold rush: artificial intelligence. To train large language models, developers use all available scripts, including the contents of shadow libraries, and the authors’ scripts were included without their knowledge or permission from their publishers, which is why they are currently suing OpenAI.
