“Most notorious” illegal shadow library sued by textbook publishers [Updated]::Previous efforts to unmask the people behind Libgen have failed.
For anyone who might be tempted to fall for the guilt-tripping about authors, text books rarely generate any income for their authors and most would be happy to open source them (as many do nowadays). They’re interested in getting useful materials out there (and the name recognition that comes from having their name on useful texts). They do not rely on book sales to make a living.
You should not feel guilty about pirating text books but you can help the authors out by asking your library to stock the text, borrowing it if your library has it (even if you’ve pirated a copy for keeps), and recommending it to others (with text that will show up on searches) if you found it useful.
Aaron Schwartz approves this comment.
Not to mention academic/research text where authors are actually forced to pay to publish, only to have the articles end up behind a pay wall of given journal. If the authors want their papers freely available, they have to pay extra fees to the journal (we are talking thousands of dollars scale). Not a cent goes back to the authors or even research funding bodies. Long live Libgen!
The update is hilarious.
Update: Publishers’ lawyer Matthew Oppenheim told Ars that Libgen is a “thieves’ den” of illegal books, and “there is no question” that Libgen’s conduct is “massively illegal.” Oppenheim said that “really, the only question is why it’s been allowed to exist this long.” He also said that it’s possible that US companies may not realize that they are aiding Libgen’s infringement, but publishers hope that when they “are confronted” with the fact “that this library is massively illegal, that hopefully they will voluntarily do the right thing” and cut off Libgen.
Seethe harder. Libgen is the savior of modern education.
It’s so obviously illegal that the best course of action is to try to get others to voluntarily stop using it? Ah yes.
The US Textbook industry single-handedly justifies the existence of Library Genesis (if it requires justification)
The EU is not any better on that front. Looking a you Elsevier and Springer.
Elsevier is probably the worst of them. When even authors want to stay away from a publisher due to their behavior, that means something.
Academic publishers don’t pay authors, which is only part of the reason we hate them. Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?.
But Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.
The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.
Yeah, this should be illegal. This is a monopoly on steroids funded by taxpayer money.
Think of how much innovation gets stifled by these gatekeepers. I’ve seen interesting research get forced out of the pipeline of a premier journal into that of a lower standard mainly because two of the reviewers held a personal grudge against the PI (principle investigator) attempting to publish.
Elsevier is pure evil
At this point I’m pretty sure even Satan sold his Elsevier stock out of ethical concern.
Buying and selling textbooks in college taught me more about American capitalism than my economics courses ever did
What part of buying a textbook for $250 then selling it back in like-new condition to the same retailer for $20 three months later is bad for the consumer?
Can’t thank libgen enough. Libgen exists to serve the original purpose of the Internet.
Sending military information?
Sharing knowledge
Nah, that was ARPANET. The internet (www) was invented because particle physicists were too lazy to carry magnetic tapes with experimental data around CERN.
Thank god! I’m also too lazy to carry around my magnetic tapes. I’m glad that happened.
To be entirely clear, the Internet is also not the World Wide Web. Which is what I believe you and @[email protected] are referring to.
I’ll stop using libgen when an ebook is cheaper than a hard copy.
Honest question. Why should it be? Isn’t the actual print of the book a very small fraction of the cost? The majority of the cost is the IP. If for example a book is $50 and the book costs $1 to print are you saying that it should be $49 and that’s the point that would convince you to purchase?
No production, storage, shipping… You think all of that costs $1? Also not every book is $50. A lot are way cheaper than that (around $10). So even $1 would be %10 which is not just a very small fraction (but again it’s more than that). See below for a screenshot of Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone. Kindle edition is even more expensive than the paper copy ($10 vs $7). Not only that it is more expensive for no reason but it is about 40% more expensive compared to the $7 price of the physical copy (and I don’t think I have to say this but I don’t think that’s a small fraction).
Edit: also I never said I don’t purchase any ebooks. I said I’ll stop using libgen when ebooks are cheaper than physical copies. Whenever I see shit like the screenshot I have attached I just pirate the book. I am not going to spend $10 on an ebook when half of that is going into Bezo’s pocket for no reason.
deleted by creator
I’ll take this lawsuit as a recommendation. Hadn’t even heard of the site before now.
Streisand effect alive and well
Libgen saved me so much money in college. They provide such a valuable service
deleted by creator
This is for college books? Or just books in general?
Books in general. I get most things from them
The copyright industry contributes very little to actual authors, hoards knowledge and charges enourmously for access to works that were financed by public funds, and should have been in the public domain from the get go.
We need a serious reform of copyright law, which will not happen until we stop lobbyists from influencing legislators.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
But after briefly disappearing, Libgen popped back up and has been online ever since, operating in defiance of that order—as well as court orders “in several countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom,” publishers’ complaint filed yesterday said.
Those countries even tried ordering “Internet service providers to block access to Libgen Sites as a result of infringement actions,” publishers said, all seemingly to no avail.
This includes tons of students whom publishers claimed are “bombarded with messages to use Libgen sites” on social media rather than paying full price for textbooks.
Instead of paying publishers to distribute books like a real library does, the complaint alleged, Libgen profits off pirated works by running advertisements alongside e-book downloads for things like online games and browser extensions.
Libgen staff, the publishers alleged, hide behind usernames like “librarian” or “bookwarrior” and rely “on proxy services that specifically conceal website operators’ identifying information.”
Thanks in part to these US companies, Libgen operators can “rely on the anonymity of the Internet and their overseas locations to hide their names and addresses and frustrate enforcement efforts against them,” publishers alleged.
The original article contains 873 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
🖤🏴🏴🏴
Added this on the post in [email protected], and it’s a bit specific to our university, but it might help others too:
