Z-library founders arrested in Argentina(justice.gov)

581 pointsby cft4 tahun yang lalu471 comments

Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/two-russian-nationals-charged-running-massive-e-book-piracy-website

471 comments

josh_fyi4 tahun yang lalu

I was delighted when my book showed up on Z-library! I of course was never paid for authoring that book; indeed I paid a subvention to publish it with Harvard University Press. At some point, the rights were sold to the giant publisher Brill, which was charging $30 per chapter for a book that has no value by chapter.

Luckily, some kind soul at University of Marburg uploaded it and Library Genesis still has it.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/141915/

https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Joshua%20Fox&column[]=autho...

phpisatrash4 tahun yang lalu

Me and my colleagues will be affected by the end of Z library and co related projects.

Here in Brazil and for sure in most second and third world countries, people don't have money to spend in books.

You can argue that people can go to the library, but in most cases it's even expensive to take a bus or taxi even a Uber.

I'm a law student at an university in brazil. Law books are really expensive. Even though my university have a library, sometimes it doesn't have the books that the professors ask us to read.

Since I found z library I could have access to most of books that I needed.

I do know that the writers and publishers have costs and they need to make money, but I don't agree with the fact that we have to pay to have knowledge. It's more like if we don't have money, we can't have knowledge.

null_object4 tahun yang lalu

I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.

Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but e-books can be purchased pretty much anywhere in the world. I'm in Sweden but buy most of my e-books from the US. But often buy books directly from publishers (hopefully they, and the author, get a better cut that way).

The fact these people were trying to personally profit (some other HN:ers have documented this), while trying to present themselves as some sort of "information wants to be free" info-warriors doesn't make the whole thing any better.

An enormous amount of work goes into producing a book - through a close friend who works in book-publishing I know a couple of authors who pretty much starve for a year or two to produce their work - and then the editing, typesetting, designing, proof-reading etc is all an enormous and personal investment.

In spite of what people think, authors are not all budding J.K.Rowlings with movie-deals and a couple of billion in the bank, and if we don't buy their books, they won't be able to produce the next one for people to pirate.

reisse4 tahun yang lalu

I guess in 2022 "don't ever travel to countries that have extradition agreements with US" should've already been #0 opsec rule, above everything else.

Sad for them. Does anyone know if Z-library provided torrent dumps?

gustavorg4 tahun yang lalu

I don't want to say in the meantime, but, in the meantime, the pedophile ring that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell served have not even been cited, ever.

dang4 tahun yang lalu

Related:

Feds Seize One of the Largest Sites for Pirated Books and Articles, Z-Library - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33570539 - Nov 2022 (6 comments)

Z-Library Aftermath Reveals the Feds Seized Dozens of Domain Names - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33530240 - Nov 2022 (73 comments)

ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 - Nov 2022 (517 comments)

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)

generationP4 tahun yang lalu

Cheap bet: We won't hear many authors rejoice over this. As an example, Stephen King's pinned tweet is concerned with a very different kind of theft ( https://nitter.it/StephenKing ).

In academia, this is slightly narrowing our choices (not much because Z-Lib has never been the main source). As for the books we can't read... well, we won't then. At this point, it's the books competing over our attention, not us scrambling to find them. Another cheap bet: The balances of academic publishers at least will not improve from this.

skjoldr4 tahun yang lalu

A reminder that Z-library is still available through Tor: http://zlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52... I doubt it took just two people to handle the entire project.

henry_viii4 tahun yang lalu

Sad day. I always talked about Z-library with reverence. Z-library was the only way I could access textbooks I was interested in when I was growing up in a developing country. I owe it to Z-library for becoming the software developer I am today.

keewee74 tahun yang lalu

IIRC Z-library is a LibGen mirror that is faster than other mirrors but is also much more monetized with more ads, limited free downloads, and premium plans.

Something else weird about this story is why did they move to a country that has an extradition agreement with the US? There are plenty of countries that would ignore US pressure to arrest them.

hd44 tahun yang lalu

Ah yes, actual hardened dangerous criminals finally facing justice.

yewenjie4 tahun yang lalu

TorrentFreak report has some extra details - https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-indicts-two-russians-for-runnin...

prirun4 tahun yang lalu

A friend recently gave me a printed copy of Legend of Drizzt. It was about 2 inches thick (3 books in 1), the printing was too small for my crappy eyes, lighting in my room at night is not great, and the printing went too close to the interior edge, all making it hard to read. So I bought a Kindle.

The Kindle worked much better. I got the Kindle Unlimited subscription at no extra cost for 3 months (then $10/mo afterwards), thinking I'd get access to any books on Amazon that were available in the Kindle format. You know, "Unlimited". Wrong! Kindle Unlimited means "whatever Kindle books Amazon wants to give you", not "Unlimited". They need to rename that to "Kindle Limited", "Kindle Picks", or whatever. Of course, this series was not part of KU.

I bought the first few books in the series, even though I already had the printed book, at $8/book, which is kinda pricey considering there are 36 books in the series, so it was going to cost ~$300 to read the whole thing. Then I found out I could download the books from the public library system. It's actually a pretty good model I think, because at least in Indiana, all of the public libraries are in a state-wide consortium, so there are about 5 copies of each book in the series available to "rent" for anyone in Indiana. And it's free.

The e-book business model of $8/book makes no sense to me, at least not for fiction. I don't want 36 already-read e-books sitting on my Kindle - it just junks things up. What I would like is to be able to take a photo of a book I already have, including the ISBN number, and get an electronic copy in my Kindle library for free. That would be so awesome, esp considering that as I get older, reading from a Kindle is way easier than dealing with a physical book.

dartharva4 tahun yang lalu

Too many Copyright defenders here, mandatory "the intellectual property oxymoron" read: http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/intellectual_property/

nivenkos4 tahun yang lalu

The American Empire strikes again.

You'd think they would have seen this coming though.

I think a long-term solution is a universal revenue-sharing programme - so like some portion of taxes is allocated to a universal repository, and then paid out to creators according to usage. No middle-men and no distribution issues, etc.

sva_4 tahun yang lalu

This makes me worried about LibGen. It would be an incredible loss to humanity to see these libraries go for good.

dchuk4 tahun yang lalu

(Hypothetically)

Couldn’t this concept be built out in a much more decentralized way, where there’s a desktop app you install that is basically a BitTorrent client and a search interface, and then the app synchronizes with all other desktop apps to keep a SQLite database updated with all of the book meta data, and then each user also contributes some amount of disk space (let’s say 1gb) that the app automatically manages storing some amount of the network’s book files in (maybe even encrypted somehow, or fragments of book files, so you never actually have a complete file on any given machine).

So basically a big torrent mesh with redundant, fragmented storage of book files everywhere. People can upload a book, the app shreds it up and broadcasts to the network, enough other apps sync those fragments on their end to make it “permanently” on the network (statistically at least).

The metadata can’t possibly be that big for a million books in a SQLite database. Users would search against their local SQLite DB, and for a book they want to download, it’s just normal BitTorrent downloads in the background. Run it all through TOR or similar.

Thoughts? I am only a user of all of the above tech, never written software for any of it. Is it possible to build a distributed and resilient file sharing system like this?

jhvkjhk4 tahun yang lalu

They are so young! Does anyone know what will happen to them after the arrestment? I sincerely think they are doing charity.

35amxn354 tahun yang lalu

Yeah extradition treaties and bowing down to the US or the Interpol are how the One World Government begins. Mix that with cheap massive surveillance tech imported from China and every country going cashless and we're in FOR A RIDE.

Andrew_nenakhov4 tahun yang lalu

I believe that copyright should be reformed, and all books must be available for free in the digital form. If there would be fewer books, well, there are more than enough fiction books than one can read in the hundred lifetimes. Technical/science books, and crucial technical information contained in them can be made available as paid web services, or authors could be funded prior to writing it - via crowdfunding, grants, or by irresistible graphomania.

jl64 tahun yang lalu

There is widespread support for the complaint that copyright duration is excessive, and that a degree of piracy should be tolerated as a form of protest, but IMHO these guys crossed a line when they tried to make money from piracy.

tartoran4 tahun yang lalu

Not many textbooks require a new edition every year and it wasn’t really as bad for the secondhand market where the original buyers would pay exhorbitant prices for textbooks but would recover some of it by selling them as used.

With new editions every semester they want to extract as much money from students which I find appalling, students are kindof poor on average. Piracy is an outcome to that

jl27184 tahun yang lalu

I looked up the actual citation. Here's what I found interesting:

Copyright theft became a crime (versus tort) in 1990 and only applied to the sale of physical copies. It expanded to digital distribution in 2008.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/506

sharperguy4 tahun yang lalu

Burn down the library of Alexandria because free access to information is too inconvenient

robomartin4 tahun yang lalu

My first thought on this is that the people who download books from these sites were never going to buy them in the first place. This is particularly true if they engaged in downloading dozens or hundreds of books. In other words, not sure just how much money anyone lost because of the existence of these sites.

If someone is never going to buy what you sell (let's say they can't afford it) and they are able to get it for free in digital form, you did not incur any expenses and you did not lose any money.

I am not trying to justify IP theft, just trying to understand the financial reality of the matter.

At the extreme is the case of an author who produces a great book after over a year of hard work only to see 100% of the books stolen in digital form. The author has a household to support and goes without income.

auggierose4 tahun yang lalu

What I was always wondering about, given they are clearly illegal, why did they bother adhering to book take down requests (and pointing out you could still access the book in question via Tor...)? Was there some jurisdiction out there where that made them legal?

ROTMetro4 tahun yang lalu

Last time I saw this many people justifying their illegal/immoral actions was when I was in prison. Criminal thinking is criminal thinking, and often starts with small justifications to tear down a persons own walls against such behavior, or to tear them down in others to pull them to your sway and away from society/prosocial behavior. We 8 billion people can not live together without certain tradeoffs, and those tradeoffs even apply to you, even when you can get around them. This thread is heartbreaking to me, having done so much work on myself to rebuild those walls of acceptable/non acceptable behaviors, to see such rot in the basic morality of such smart people.

It's 2022, there is more access to information and knowledge than ever in human history. Anyone that wants to make their knowledge or information free to the world can do that easily. These books were SPECIFICALLY not made free public knowledge. That you want them does not mean you are entitled to the choices of others in how they want choose to distribute their works. That they have enough value to you to make you want to steal them shows that there is more to that than simple 'knowledge everyone should be entitled to', because that knowledge is available on the internet in other forms.

lofaszvanitt4 tahun yang lalu

You can set your own rules regarding books.

If you profit from a book, you must buy it, no questions answered.

If you pass the 50th page, go buy it.

Same applies to software... if you are generating income with it, you must buy it.

Rest is up to your conscience.

uni_baconcat4 tahun yang lalu

I respect the copyright of publisher and author, I also admire people sharing expensive knowledge to those who do not have the ability to get one. This is a hard choice to me.

woadwarrior014 tahun yang lalu

Now, do SBF.