I don't get it, on the frontpage you have books like "Harry Potter", I'm fairly sure that's not open source or even available for free distribution. It also seems counter intuitive that you get preferential treatment if you login, why would that be the case, if it's truly open?
In this case open-source does not mean only open-source books. Anna's Archive is a shadow library, they also maintain a pirate library mirror. So you can think of them like an anarchist(?) archivist?
I think only the high-speed direct downloads require logging-in but other downloads and torrents are freely available.
Violating copyright is the whole point. The contention of this archive seems to be that Project Gutenberg is in fact not "open," because it's constrained by its adherence to copyright laws.
You're missing the entire argument. The argument here is that they are not pirates, because copyright is stifles the spread of knowledge and should therefore be completely abolished.
Whether you get it or not is something different all together. But that's what people are fighting for.
Where do they discuss the topic ? as much I loved zlib .. I cannot forget that copyrights is what allows knowledge to be spread most of the time. If people couldn't at least live from their writing (not even make a big profit) how else would book emerge ?
Somewhere, a publisher is giggling as they change the constants in problems in an otherwise unchanged first semester physics book with an upcoming new edition.
I think a lot of good books never pay their authors much, at least in proportion to the effort that goes into researching and writing them. Scihub was also violating copyright, but academic paper authors don't get paid by publishers; they the journals. Lots of intellectual labor goes into producing a good where the author would much rather you read it without paying than buy it but not read it.
This is all to say, the publishers, who are perhaps no longer needed in the 21st century, are sales motivated, but there's at least a substantial category of authors who are not.
Project Gutenberg has been fought (censored, blocked, sued) by statal entities, like germany and italy - it may happen because of occasional improper insertions, or because of local legislation inconsistent with that which the Project references, or because of bestiality of the attacker.
The Internet Archive might be better example, depending on your definition of open. They have over 4 million books archived. I believe Project Gutenberg have around 70k.
The Internet Archive include books still in copyright, which can be read by "borrowing" them virtually.
Reminder: based on the idea that "if the library holds a physical copy it can lend an electronic view over it, respecting the same principle of the physical object, i.e. one user per item per period (i.e. one user per use instance)". Such principle is being fought.
The idea of a shadow library is to disseminate knowledge to everyone, to provide easy access to readily available content which is made inaccessible through paywalls, copyright, or other similar barriers.
At inception, these databases were created to make academic content freely available which generally does not compensate the original publishers. But now it has been expanded to support the knowledge for free movement.
The legal status is questionable as creators can provide their own content to such libraries but their publishers might not agree to it.
oh that's weird are they honeypotting me like if I try to fast-download harry potter the intellectual property police will come at me for violating the wizarding world extended universe franchise
I would expect a nasty letter delivered by an owl, followed by a visit by a stern gandalf looking mf flanked by two furries guards each seven feet tall and armed with a different medieval polearm
