Rise of Pirate Libraries

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Joly MacFie <joly () punkcast com>
> Date: July 23, 2017 at 6:53:59 PM EDT
> To: dave <dave () farber net>
> Subject: Rise of Pirate Libraries
> Reply-To: joly () punkcast com
>
> [via Jim Griffin]
>
> http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-rise-of-illegal-pirate-libraries
>
> Shadowy digital libraries want to hold all the world's knowledge and give it away for free.
>
> by Sarah Laskow April 21, 2016
> Atlas Obscura
>
> All around the world, shadow libraries keep growing, filled with banned materials. But no actual papers trade hands: 
> everything is digital, and the internet-accessible content is not banned for shocking content so much as that modern 
> crime, copyright infringement.
>
> But for the people who run the world's pirate libraries, their goals are no less ambitious for their work's illicit 
> nature.
>
> "It's the creation of a universal library of the best stuff," says Joe Karaganis, who studies media piracy at 
> Columbia University's policy think tank, American Assembly. "That will not include the latest Danielle Steel novel."
>
> It does, however, include hundreds of thousands of books and millions of journal articles that otherwise are found 
> only through expensive academic journals. Scanned or downloaded from journal sites, they are available through pirate 
> libraries for free.
>
> The creators of these repositories are a small group who try to keep a low profile, since distributing copyrighted 
> material in this way is illegal. Many of them are academics. The largest pirate libraries have come from Russia's 
> cultural orbit, but the documents they collect are used by people around the world, in countries both wealthy and 
> poor. Pirate libraries have become so popular that in 2015, Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers in 
> America, went to court to try to shut down two of the most popular, Sci-Hub and Library Genesis.
>
> These libraries, Elsevier alleged, cost the company millions of dollars in lost profits. But the people who run and 
> support pirate libraries argue that they're filling a market gap, providing access to information to researchers 
> around the world who wouldn't have the resources to obtain these materials any other way.
>
> The lawsuits, wrote one group of pirate library supporters, "come as a big blow" to researchers whose only source of 
> scholarly material is in these sites. "The social media, mailing lists and IRC channels have been filled with their 
> distress messages, desperately seeking articles and publications," the brief states.
>
> In other words, they believe there are researchers who are never going to be able to pay the steep price of academic 
> articles; either they use pirate libraries, which give them efficient access to information, or they don't get to 
> read those books and journals at all.
>
> Today's pirate libraries have their roots in the work of Russian academics to digitize texts in the 1990s. Scholars 
> in that part of the world had long had a thriving practice of passing literature and scientific information 
> underground, in opposition to government censorship-part of the samizdat culture, in which banned documents were 
> copied and passed hand to hand through illicit channels. Those first digital collections were passed freely around, 
> but when their creators started running into problems with copyright, their collections "retreated from the public 
> view," writes Balázs Bodó, a piracy researcher based at the University of Amsterdam. "The text collections were far 
> too valuable to simply delete," he writes, and instead migrated to "closed, membership-only FTP servers."
>
> More recently, though, those collections have moved online, where they are available to anyone who knows where to 
> look. One of the earliest pirate libraries on the web, lib.ru, was created by one of those Russian academics. In the 
> past decade or so, there have been a succession of libraries-Gigapedia, Kolkhoz, Librusec, and most recently Libgen 
> and Sci-Hub, that have grown to gigantic size, only to be broken up or shut down. Libraries that started as 
> repositories primarily of Russian-language text grew to include a corpus of English-language works, which fueled 
> their growth.
>
> "There's been a shift from Russian-language system to one that's systematically mining the libraries of Western 
> universities and publishers," says Karaganis.
>
> There's always been osmosis within the academic community of copyrighted materials from people with access to scholar 
> without. "Much of the life of a research academic in Kazakhstan or Iran or Malaysia involves this informal diffusion 
> of materials across the gated walls of the top universities," he says. What changed more recently is the speed and 
> technology through which that happens.
>
> Alexandra Elbakyan, the neuroscientist from Kazakhstan who created Sci-Hub, for instance, was able to rig up a system 
> that basically jumped the fence of journal paywalls. When someone requested an article, her system first checked the 
> LibGen database. But if the article wasn't there, the system used donated passwords to log into journal websites, 
> download the article, and deliver it both to the user who requested it and the main database. It's a much more 
> efficient system than the informal #icanhazPDF economy in which researchers would request certain documents on social 
> media and hope a kind soul would provide.
>
> Who's benefiting from this? The workings of pirate libraries are necessarily opaque, but Bodó's research into one in 
> particular shows that users come from both countries with high GDP and developing countries where students and 
> scholars likely have poor access to academic materials. Bodó found that the most downloads came from Russia, 
> Indonesia and the United States, in the case of this library, with the most per capita coming from Central and 
> Eastern European countries. The average document had been downloaded three times.
>
> His research also showed that access could be driving the market for these libraries: two-thirds of the downloads 
> were for books that didn't have a Kindle version, and in developing countries, people were more likely to be 
> downloading titles that just weren't available in print.
>
> Publishers are facing great difficulty controlling the growth of the world's pirate libraries, as they can be set up 
> as open source entities that let anyone provide access to their base catalogue, along with whatever else they want to 
> share at their particular site. But the pirate librarians also lack conventional library controls. Organizers can 
> prevent books from entering the collection, but they can't necessarily requisition or order particular articles or 
> books, the way that a librarian would. The result is vast but eclectic collections of work, mostly very serious, but 
> sometimes not. Libgen, Karaganis notes, in addition to its high-brow academic collection, also has an enormous store 
> of pirated comic books.
>
>
> -- 
> ---------------------------------------------------------------
> Joly MacFie  218 565 9365 Skype:punkcast
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> -



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