Actually not sure about LibGen in its current manifestation, but the wikipedia page clearly traces its origin and earlier iterations to Russia

I don't think there's any evidence of that, it's just supposition based on them being unable to locate them.

Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself.

That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.

> Why aren't … operating solely as an onion service on TOR?

> They’re not on TOR because

Any downsides to being available on many decentralized overlay networks in addition to plain https, other than (compute/net/human) resources?

Doesn't z-lib have a kind of hybrid approach where some things are available on clearnet but for certain account-based features it's TOR?

"The Web" requires a native client program to access, yet over time has gained ever wider adoption as "most people" come to see the value and realize it's in their interest to do what it takes to gain access. We need to be evangelizing secure protocols in the same manner, especially as the insecure/centralizing protocols become ever more censored.

You only need a dynamic-DNS system on the hidden service. Then you can avoid the regulatory capture of registrars and host in a friendly country.

In this case it's not the privacy you need from ToR but access so it doesn't really matter if the NSA runs the exit nodes because you're not exiting.

Do you really believe that? Stuff like that is really troublesome to keep alive. Piratebay is hardly the thing is was, and it's a torrent site, which is relatively easy to host. A better example would be rarbg, which is not alive anymore. They only exist because of almost fanatical dedication of some highly productive individuals, god bless them. Even if they don't get into serious trouble, it's still a hassle to avoid getting into trouble and work with actual content, not just host a bunch of torrent-links other people provide. So, at some point they'll lose the desire to do that, and I am not so sure that there always will be somebody to take post.

In fact, I even worry a bit about what will happen to Linux when Torvalds finally passes away, and for sure Linux depends on him much less so than all those pirate resources on the people who maintain them.

It keeps the lawyers employed

tpb is not really still extant

With old torrents, nothing compared to its heyday. I wonder where people get the esoteric stuff from now. 5-10 years ago it used to me newzbins and demonoid

I was considering getting one but your comment worries me. Do you have an older device? I thought the device itself could do the DRM if you threw an acsm file at it?

It's a pretty good OSINT tool for threat actors to map out your operation imho

How can there be any doubt?

Not entirely sure why this was dead. This is the answer to GP's question.

There are online vendors who will lease out their AdX accounts. The industry is rife with fraud.

Meh. Not really.

Ryujinx still has a patreon so running a patreon is not what solely did them in.

The biggest vulnerability for hackers has always been trying to get normie clout for our actions. Whether back in the day from pure social bragging, or now from trying to tie in to contemporary surveillance media. It's painful to watch, but if they had been more reserved you likely wouldn't hearing about them in the first place.

tag manager can inject scripts that can observe pretty much why interaction with the site

You mean man in the middle deeply suspicious project maintained by who knows who which promotes itself as privacy protecting service.

Yes - don't take my advice, but isn't the precedent with BitTorrent piracy that downloaders aren't gone after, only uploaders?

It's an eternal struggle. The "perfect capitalist" wants infinite money with zero cost labor. The "perfect consumer" wants high quality products for free delivered instantly.

Even if we assume a more altruistic ideal, a businessman needs enough money to keep providing their services. But as the economy gets worse, that breaking point becomes less and less obtainable for a reasonable consumer (who's price is "cheap enough to maintain their QoL"). You can't really fix that without lobbying to being down living expenses as a whole.

There is no pricing that would satisfy the person you are responding to other than free.

All my code (that isn't owned by a business, contractually) is free (well, technically I have a couple of private repos, but they're not paid access, they're just not available). So are all of the translation and commission work I did: people were paying to choose what I'd do next, not to keep something exclusive for themselves.

My code could effectively be free. The thing is most consumers don't care for code, they care for products. So I don't think open sourcing a currently closed source project would impact 99% of tech out there.

they might suggest various other revenue models aside from royalties.

For instance, taking on production of art as a commission or pre-sale, releasing a book once a fundraising goal has been met, but not attempting to sue people for unauthorized copies after the fact

Maybe get back to the original 20 years of copyright protection instead of the insane “70 years after death of the author” that has been made solely for the interest of the IP holders?

Eh idk but books should definitely be free. We can talk about the rest once the books are free.

Many have done so, and will continue to do. No one has to be persuaded if they have thoughts on their mind. Compensation is the side-effect.

[0]: https://monoskop.org

[1]: https://www.rheingold.com/texts/tft/

[2]: https://computerhistory.org/collections/

[3]: https://oapen.org/

The people who are using libgen, are probably also not the people who would pay an author for a book anyway.

Not saying I agree or disagree one way or another, but that's really probably the reality.

Yes: we can pay authors nothing. It works. In fact we can make them grovel to get something published, and even get them to pay for the privilege of being considered for the publishing we're offering zero compensation for.

We can give ourselves a cool name. "Elsevier" has a nice ring to it.

> Do you have thoughts on persuading people to spend years of their lives writing books for zero compensation?

Most books make very very little income for the author. So it is already the case.

This is like saying that no great software would exist if people didn't get paid for developing software.

Do you think books which are written by people who had to be persuaded to write them are worth reading?

They should find a patron or grant making institution that values the production of knowledge, not publishers who seek property to license out.

I buy most of my books second hand. The author doesn't get anything from that either. Should it be illegal?

Lots of people already do, in essence.

I think a UBI could be a good start.

Wait until you discover that researchers aren't compensated by publishing corporations for their papers. Or that most book authors get ridiculous royalties in their publishing contract (a few percent of the price, including for ebooks that are being sold at the price of paper copies) unless they are already famous.

Authors and editors should be able to live from their work and libgen et al should exist as well. I don't think it's so incomprehensible to imagine that reality because we are living that reality right now. We can also save a lot of money if we get rid of publishers. People will always buy physical books that will be enough to sustain authors, on top of that we can subsidize from taxes. You have to remember that not everyone is a liberal.

Unconditional basic income. Grants for the arts. Stipends. Unconditional basic income. Sponsorships. Unconditional basic income. Donations. Maybe even unconditional basic income.

Look, no artistic endeavor needs to make a billion dollars. Even when something does take a billion dollars in revenue, none of it goes to the artists anyway! Music labels and movie studios and book publishers are infamous for creative accounting and bogus contracts and outright lies to fuck over almost every person that actually contributed to the art. They're worse than politicians. It's all there to funnel even more money to people who are already rich. If you put artists on basic income you're not paying them any less, you're not losing anything, 99.9% of them come out ahead of where they would've been if they'd sold their work for money. Maybe add a couple more nines to that list. For every multimillionaire movie star or generation-defining author there are literally hundreds of thousands of artists just barely scraping by. Capitalist art only benefits the leeches.

Authors? Its the publishers who get paid. The authors just write the words.

My positive experiences with libraries is exactly what I’m drawing on. It seems to me that if physical libraries can be made free to use, nothing prevents a digital equivalent other than lack of the same sort of funding.

I don’t really agree it’s unachievable, just a matter of political will imo. All that would have to happen is enough public interest to outweigh publisher lobbying.

It's actually amusingly easy to have ChatGPT criticize some OpenAI practice or another. Tell it to do a search for some controversial story, then to "analyze it from an ethical standpoint".

if you ask it to explain how it arrived at this reasoning, they'll ban you.

Seriously, who is running around here on HN downvoting such comments?

RIP Aaron Swartz.

So, the solution to legal problems is… money? Lots of money?

beautifully put, thank you! it's the golden rule - those with the gold make up the rules.

> maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.

Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection of printed literature on STEM topics, the books have published not for the sake of earning money, also they used to have free libraries among all the villages. This is the closest example I can give and BTW those Russian books are freely published on Russian torrent trackers.

> A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations

Even without any further clarification the search among existing countries is going to return 0 results.

How would this differ from a system of public libraries, which most advanced countries have?

But how should people be incentivized to create new stuff if the old one isn't being hidden away from the public's eyes. /s

> I would be more empathetic if publishers gave the same lending rights to ebooks as they give to physical ones. As it is, the publishers basically extort libraries to the point where offering ebooks drains coffers way more than physical ones.

Publishers give you no lending rights on physical books; legislation and common law give you rights to lend that stem from the first-sale doctrine where I live. Push your legislators (or courts) to establish first-sale doctrine over digital content and there you go.

> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.

We are living in the most productive time ever for the book industry, I think comparing the current industry to the past when we produce several orders of magnitude more works that many people highly value is nonsensical.

> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.

Who do you think was feeding the monks?

> You may think your work is super unique/original/awesome, but the reality is 99% of the content of 99% of books is not unique or original, and those works wouldn't exist without massively relying on and borrowing from other works.

Cool so you won't miss it when libgen is gone then? I mean if there's nothing unique or original there then what's to miss right?

> Books existed long before publishers and copyright, and seem to have survived quite well.

I don't know how else to measure the health of books other than measuring the health of publishing, and it doesn't seem like it's doing so great:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...

I'm not saying the publishing industry is sane or just, but how does belittling the work of the authors help anything?

I'm an author, and the compensation you're quoting is wildly low.

Beyond that: I've co-written two reasonably successful technical books. The amount of non-writing work that went into them is staggering: editing, reviewing, laying them out, creating illustrations, translating them into different languages, making them available for sale across the world, etc. It requires an unbelievable amount of skill, talent, and hard work.

The raw draft we hand in looks embarrassing beside the finished product.

Books are far cheaper to print than most people realize. If you see a publisher charging 5-10% less for an ebook than a physical book, it's because they're pricing the ebook at whatever the physical book's price is, minus the printing costs.

That's why you see pulp paperbacks selling for $20+ so that the e-book looks like a steal at $15.

There's a fairly small pool of readers for a niche technical book. Selling it for $0.99 won't meaningfully increase the number of buyers, and it won't recover enough revenue to meet the cost of production.

I've seen ebooks being sold for more money than the printed version.

lmao. As a painter-turned-software engineer, this rings true.

Easily is the operative word. Blockbuster was easy but you had to drive there -- netflix is easier. Libraries similarly require driving (unless you use overdrive / similar) but piracy is easier for many as well. Books just haven't found their spotify/netflix; the kindle store is basically 2009 itunes.

My library even lets me check out books from Kobo e-reader.

That are not for technical books, and Amazon used to be famous for deleting a book from used's devices. It is not exactly fare to compale an honest source of technical books which allows anyone to download some rare tech books with a source of DRM which requires me to deal with something not exactly reading. Just look at those websites - who is that visitor of libgen website who needs those animations?