There were worse "burns" than this. 1M books is now fairly easily obtainable over a 6 month obsessive hunt on the Internet.
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.
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.
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.
imagine sci-hub is intimidated out of business some date in the future... we would come to regret not making backups, but the size is too large at least 60+TB last I checked. Let's say 60GB were feasible for an average individual. So now we need a decentralized way to ensure we have division of responsibility. How do we divide the labor?
Suppose everyone downloads all the articles for which the hash converted to decimal modulo (3 * 365) equals the user's ((birthyear % 3) * 365+birthday)
Then if a few ten thousand participate, we'd have a backup
Something crazy I didn't know, in the article:
>In France, on January 13, 1535, a law was enacted (at the request of the Catholic Church) which forced the closure of all bookshops and stipulated death penalty by hanging for anybody using a printing press.
either that, or the copyright enforcement regime has lifted human creativity to unprecedented heights because of the financial protection it afforded, while simultaneously encouraging people to create original work rather than clinging to derivative trend-chasing.
> encouraging people to create original work rather than clinging to derivative trend-chasing.
Which is opposite of what I observe when studying what my local cinemas have to offer me. (Given that movie industry is enjoying copyright protections the most, and that it's arguably the most-grossing of all.)
Libgen seems to have plenty of mirrors - if there's one good thing about high profile shutdowns like library.nu or what.cd it's that it tends to distribute these libraries out across more surface and make them harder to kill
The article claims: "There is no legal nor illegal alternative to it as of today."
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.
I am an academic, with about 25 scholarly publications, depending on how you count them (see http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/ for a list and for links to download them). I am here to tell you that we DO NOT GET PAID for writing papers (which, much more than books, are the primary medium of research in the sciences). Of the 25 listed papers, I got paid something for one of them, which was not really research but activism -- and I was paid by the acdvocacy group, not by a publisher. For some of the papers on the list, _I_ paid the _publisher_: this is not unusual.
There is literally no downside for an academic author to have his or or her work made freely available to the world: only the considerable upside of greatly increased visibility and influence -- which is the true currency of academia.
As another academic author who works in vastly different field, I can confirm this is true in all disciplines I have had the opportunity to discuss with colleagues. It is common to pay a thousand and not uncommon to pay a few thousand to get something published, and the most that can be made from an academic book is in the same range. If I were to write for profit, it would be by writing a popularized version of a trending topic with far less academic value than a typical publication.
Academics may get paid an advance for textbooks, some of which will earn out their advance, an even smaller portion of which will go to a second edition, an even smaller portion of which will make their author some serious money.
For the overwhelming majority of books published by academics that are not textbooks fewer than 5,000 will ever be printed and that’s being really generous. They’re academic books, written for academic readers and the only people who make any money on them are the publishers.
I have quite a few friends who have written technical books, universally they say that the money isn't worth the huge amount of time it takes. So you either do it for the prestige, or because you want to share your knowledge.
There's something to be said about low five figures being meaningfully different from zero, but we already have plenty of people sharing knowledge for free, so I'm still pretty convinced this doesn't matter.
IMO books need to become more collaborative affairs, rather than spewing out ever more of them. We already have a lot of books that overlap in completely unclear ways, and what we actually need is a way to integrate this knowledge.
Have any of your friends self-published? That seems to be the way of at least possibly making some real money off of publishing a technical book, particularly if you have some added value content you can sell with it as a more expensive package, like a video course, extensive sample code or cheat sheets.
No. Most of them have had good things to say about their editors too. And again, they are not doing with a profit motive in mind, and self-publishing can conflict with other goals, e.g. prestige.
Publishers also help your book stand out from the Pakt hordes. Not that all of Pakt is bad, but a lot of people are unwilling to even look at books from there.
Most writing pays very little or nothing. The Stephen Kings and JK Rowlings of the world are very much the exception, not the rule.
Money is not the only reason to do something. I'm a freelance writer and blogger. I would love to be financially better off than I am, but the reality is life is much more complicated than just what pays money and what doesn't.
Even when you do make money at something, there are things that you have to do that aren't per se monetized, yet are necessary parts of the process. If you try to excise them in the name of profit, it can kill the goose that is laying the golden eggs.
Just to add, JK Rowling said that she wrote it in the hope that one day one of her kids would find it in a thrift shop and they’d be amazed to see their mum’s name on the cover.
She wasn’t expecting to be this successful either.
Yeah. She wrote it while she was in sort of double limitation - unable to pay for baby daycare having only money from some social program and unable to find a job because lack of daycare. She was however able to write while caring about baby so she did it.
As an author of a book on a niche technical subject, the profit motive was not actually in the revenue from book sales, but rather the prestige associated with being the author of a book on something.
I’m currently writing a book, and I’ll be very impressed and happy if I get as much as $2000 for it.
This was not financially “smart” given how long I spent on it (it’s around 400 pages), but even if I was doing this for the money rather than the need to tell the story, my main financial risk isn’t piracy — its all the other highly competent writers writing better books. In fact, my desire to make it the best it can be is why it’s taking me so long…
Many University presses make money by selling hard bound copies to academic libraries. When some of these books become popular, paperback copies are sold. Usually, a hard bound copies are 3 to 4 times more expensive than paperbacks. Even when academic libraries acquire a paperback copy, they send these books for binding to preserve them for decades, if not centuries.
Academics want their books to be published by 'reputed' publishers, so that these books can be accessible in libraries, unless a professor requests his library to acquire it.
Now we have so many fiefdoms online: all Oxford University Press publications are available on oxfordscholarship.com. Every major publisher has its own online access. It is like online movie catalogues held by different companies. And no one has access to all of them. This is why even academics go and search on scihub and libgen sites for books, instead of going through their libraries.
Academics want their works to be known to fellow academics and the public as well. That's the incentive, not royalty.
There are far more consumers of technical writings due to the accessibility today. Had you been in the 90's you most likely would never afford to publish on the scale possible with online sales today.
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.
Downloading books and articles from libgen is technically "theft of intellectual property". So is torrenting proprietary software, music, etc.
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).
Why don't Americans find this form of 'IP theft' equally ethically problematic? I suspect the answer is some combination of:
(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.
(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.
To the extent that 'Chinese theft of intellectual property' occurs, can it be attributed to the same motivations?
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".
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 not being just as exhorbitant as Springer, Kluwer etc, in many cases.
I can solve your dilemma easily. Don't use the phrase "Intellectual Property". Use "copyright" and "trade secret" to refer to those two separate concepts.
"Chinese theft of intellectual property" is all about trade secrets, something completely unrelated to copyright.
(There's also a distinction between violating copyright for yourself, and violating copyright to sell copies of something, but I don't think you meant bootlegging so we don't need to address that right now.)
Can you explain the moral relevance of that distinction - the reason one kind of theft of intellectual property is morally less bad than the other.
One idea is this: stealing trade secret is "active theft" whereas stealing copyright is "passive theft". You do not need to leave your house in order to steal someone's copyright. By contrast, to steal closely guarded trade secrets you practically must conduct espionage. So this form of theft reminds us more of real world robbery. We are apt to consider the victim physically violated (by comparison, the idea that by downloading some pdfs from libgen while sitting at home in bathrobes we've 'physically violated' Springer obviously sounds very odd)
If that's the response then my reply is twofold. First, just because something is more 'graphical' doesn't mean it's morally worse. For example, many omnivores tend to consider people who eat dogs and cats to be especially evil. On reflection, they realize that they have no principled basis for judging themselves to be morally superior to the dog- and cat-eaters. The only reason their initially reacted as they did was because they found the imagery of eating dogs and cats much more graphical, since dogs and cats are such cute animals. But cuteness is not (as most people would agree) a morally relevant difference.
It's also worth pointing out that stealing trade secret is more graphical than stealing copyright only because of contingent technological reasons. If we lived before xerox machines, stealing books may require making efforts not that different from physical robbery.
Second, I want to point out that you haven't really responded to the substance of my point. My point was that perhaps the Chinese is unconcerned about their 'theft of intellectual property (trade secret)' for the same reason many Americans are unconcerned about their 'theft of intellectual property (copyright)': because "it's not theft to steal something from those who aren't entitled to it". Simply pointing to the distinction between 'trade secret' and 'copyright' is not yet pointing to a distinction that makes an obvious difference. If the point is simply "stealing trade secret is obviously much worse than stealing copyright, because trade secrets are closely guarded, so you need to basically pry them away from the victim", then (i) see my first reply above and (ii) note that the two acts of theft I stated in my original post, because they involve literal acts of physical violence, is obviously much more 'graphical' than any industrial espionage.
> Can you explain the moral relevance of that distinction - the reason one kind of theft of intellectual property is morally less bad than the other.
Two different crimes don't have to be strictly better or worse to get different reactions. But scale and profit are big factors here.
Anyway, I don't think it's active vs. passive at all. Your original point (i) was much better. The person asking for money didn't make the science, and isn't using that money to fund more science.
The Chinese "IP theft" is copying from someone that made it, is using it, and isn't interested in selling it. It's a violation of privacy, not just "IP".
> "it's not theft to steal something from those aren't entitled to it"
What's 'it' here, exactly? It can't be payment, because there's no price in the first place. But it's hard to argue that someone that developed a tech isn't entitled to the tech... If 'it' is exclusivity, that's a valid worldview, but it doesn't quite address the issue of using fraudulent means to get access.
They're such very different actions that I don't see any point in bundling them together.
But if you do insist on bundling, then you need to address how a pirate is making a personal copy, and a company copying tech is on a completely different level.
> note that the two acts of theft I stated in my original post
I have noted them. They are bad. I'm with the other responder in ignoring any attempts at whataboutism, so this note is irrelevant to anything else in the post. (Also china's performing extremely similar crimes, so it's a weird tack to use those as some kind of hypothetical comparison.)
(i) Imagine a billionaire who acquired his fortune from pyramid schemes. One day he fell victim to someone else's scam and is left penniless. He goes to confront the scammer to demand his money back. The scammer admits to carrying out the scam, but points out to the former billionaire that the money stolen from him was stolen in the first place. "That's just whataboutism," the former billionaire protests indignantly, "just because I did something bad in the past doesn't give you the right to do bad things to me".
Do you see the problem with the former billionaire's response?
(ii) To describe trade secrets as "science" sounds incorrect (I would reserve the term for the kind of stuff published in science journals, that genuinely tries to push the boundaries of human knowledge).
(iii) The kind of trade secret you are referring to are much more like source codes for proprietary software. You are sold some device that does a certain job. However, how exactly it does this job, is kept from your knowledge, because if you know it you would be able to make copies of it yourself, which would hurt the bottom line of the party selling the device. A more homespun example is KFC's recipe for their fried chicken. If the secret recipe is known, people would be able to make their KFC-flavor fried chicken at home. They wouldn't need to visit KFC to get it.
(iv) once we see that the "trade secrets" alluded to are things like closed source software's source code, and KFC's secret recipe, one thing that should immediately come to mind is the entire free software movement, the most prominent spokesman of which has repeatedly argued that proprietary software is "evil". Is it really okay to sell things that is promised to do a certain job but how it does that job is not being revealed? Would we ever allow drug manufacturers to sell drugs that promise to cure some condition via undisclosed mechanism? How do we know the closed source software isn't spying on us? Etc.
(v) Moreover, it becomes obvious at this point, that the only difference between the libgen type of cases and the "trade secret" cases is the difference in how easy it is to make copies. If you have a physical book or an ebook or an mp3, it's trivially easy to make an identical copy. But if you have a piece of KFC fried chicken in front of you, that in itself is of no help if you want a second helping. You can't just xerox the fried chicken, you need the recipe. And if the recipe is being locked away in some secret cabinet and you absolutely need it, then you need to steal it. But then this seems to suggest that those who pirate books have little basis on which to claim moral superiority to those who steal recipes/source codes. At the end of the day, they are both making unauthorized copies. The only difference is that the pirares are much more fortunate in that they have a much easier time making copies than the thieves stealing trade secrets. But is that a morally significant difference? How can it be that crime A is morally less bad than crime B simply because A is easier to commit?
(i) If we want a fair analogy, it's not the same money. It would have to be money he legitimately earned decades later that was stolen. In which case he's got a point.
3-4 All this does is help explain how copyright and trade secrets are not the same thing.
> How can it be that crime A is morally less bad than crime B simply because A is easier to commit?
It's not just ease, it's A) whether it involves privacy violations and fraud, B) the nature of the use after making the copy.
People, internationally, including Westerners, violate copyright law on a regular basis to download information they previously did not have access to. Some of them, not all of them, feel justified in doing so because in some way their tax dollars probably helped pay for some of it.
What Westerners, Americans mostly, but not just them, have taken issue with regarding Chinese theft of IP is threefold: State-sponsored espionage, bootlegging, and relaxed IP laws relative to Western countries that are also enforced in a relaxed manner. Personally of those, the only item on that list I would personally take issue with is the espionage, not because I think IP laws are worthless, but because we have bad, arguably unjust IP laws as the norm.
I won’t address your pointed jabs at the United States. This is neither the topic nor the forum.
The distinguishing factor is whether there is a victim, not “ease”. There is such a thing as a victimless crime and if we are talking about espionage, then there is definitely a victim. That is a case that can be made with copyright violation, but it is a much weaker case and generally has to be determined on a case by case basis whether or not there was actually a victim, i.e. was someone actually harmed in some way or are they just saying they were? I defer to the courts on this one.
I agree that our intuitive reaction is to think that in one case there is clearly a victim whereas in the other case this is much less clear. However as I said when I brought up the omnivore vs dog/cat-eater example, our intuitive moral reactions are often unreliable and we need to always subject them to critical examination.
When I ask myself, why does it seem to me, intuitively, that there is clearly a victim in the case of espionage but not in the case of piracy, I find that I cannot point to anything other than the sheer "graphical" character of espionage. When I think of espionage what comes to mind is careful, deliberate, calculated planning and execution (the evil villain in cartoons and all that), whereas when I think of piracy I think of a harmless dude at home sitting in front of his computer wrapped in bathrobes.
The question though is whether this sort of difference has moral relevance. And I'm strongly inclined to think not. First notice that neither the spy nor the harmless dude physically harmed anyone. The damage is entirely monetary. (I will spare your American sensibilities and not bring up the violent character of those thefts I brought up in my OP).
Now you may say, the harmless dude at best cost a few dollars damage but the spy cost billions. But on reflection this doesn't hold water, because (i) there are millions of these harmless dudes, so the damages add up and (ii) the damage caused by the spy is not on any single individual but is also similarly distributed, so at the individual level it could may well be very tiny.
I could go on, but I hope you'll agree that the challenge I've poses for Americans (how to reconcile their different attitudes towards piracy and industrial espionage) is far from a trivial one and it's intellectually dishonest to pretend otherwise.
I should also add the following point. Suppose in the future 3D duplication became a reality, so that those who want more KFC can just buy one and perform 3D "copy-paste" (sitting at home wrapped in bathrobes) - no need to steal the secret recipe. Likewise to get one more advanced CPU there is no need to spy and steal the secret blueprint and all that, just 3D "copy paste".
Would you say that, in this future scenario, where making copies of fried chicken/CPU chips are no different from making copies of ebook and mp3s ─── would you say that these acts of "IP theft" also suddenly become virtually "victimless"?
(Typing in a hurry so some editing may need to be done later on)
Addendum: a variant of my parting example above. Programs written in some languages (e.g. Javascript) are much easier to reverse engineer than others (e.g. C). To get the source code of a closed source C program you pretty much have to conduct espionage (hack the developer's computer), whereas to get the source code of a closed source JavaScript program, it may take little more than hitting a few buttons.
Would you argue that if someone's closed source C app source code is stolen via espionage/hacking, the developer has been victimized, but if someone's closed source JavaScript app source code is stolen via "hitting a few buttons", there is now suddenly no victim? It seems to me that holding such a view would have some absurd consequences. Suppose I can write an app in either C or JavaScript, I may then reason: "I should write it in JavaScript, that way I won't ever be victimized." - which I hope you'll agree, is clearly nonsensical.
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.
It was so good that artists, released their stuff there, first. For free, to get coverage, and it worked.