The bizarre thing is that they asked for donations as Amazon gift cards! Surely Amazon could have blocked them?
Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
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Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe ads on the platfom? I'm not sure because 1. i use libgen 2. i run adblock. But it wouldn't be surprising that such a popular platform would have ads. Z-library was a site for pirated e-books, no?
shh! do you want lingren to get taken down as well? whether accurately or not, the takedowns is attribute to a sudden burst of popularity due to social media sharing of the site.
Z-library was popular amongst everyone, hackernews is a really niche website. But I believe with that website going down people will start looking for alternatives.
If everything fails, we can always go back to download books through IRC.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#63The bizarre thing is that they asked for donations as Amazon gift cards! Surely Amazon could have blocked them?
And how would Amazon know which gift cards were donated to them? You can buy them with cash everywhere, re-sell the product you bought in cash and use that to fund the site.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#64A small thought experiment: - Book sales in 2021 were about _9_ billion dollars. [0] - Wage theft in the US is estimated at _50_ billion dollars. [1] Can you imagine if the resources of the justice and labour departments would prioritize citizen wage over publishers' revenue? Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals completely outside US jurisdi…
> Wage theft in the US is estimated at _50_ billion dollars. [1]
That report is from 2014. What does it stand at today (whether in absolute or relative terms)?
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#65I guess in 2022 "don't ever travel to countries that have extradition agreements with US" should've already been #0 opsec rule, above everything else. Sad for them. Does anyone know if Z-library provided torrent dumps?
Extradition agreements are irrelevant when extraordinary rendition is a legal and valid option.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#66A small thought experiment: - Book sales in 2021 were about _9_ billion dollars. [0] - Wage theft in the US is estimated at _50_ billion dollars. [1] Can you imagine if the resources of the justice and labour departments would prioritize citizen wage over publishers' revenue? Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals completely outside US jurisdi…
>>Would you rather have funds allocated towards social justice or have them spent on intimidating foreign nationals
I would rather the justice department, and labor dept choose their targets for non-political reasons, neither for "social justice" nor corporate protectionism
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#67The American Empire strikes again. You'd think they would have seen this coming though. I think a long-term solution is a universal revenue-sharing programme - so like some portion of taxes is allocated to a universal repository, and then paid out to creators according to usage. No middle-men and no distribution issues, etc.
What about a Spotify for books?
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
As Russian nationals, their choices are rather limited at this time.
No? The countries that don't have extradition agreements with the US overlap a lot with countries that have friendly relations with Russia. China, Cuba, and Russia would be the ideal choices if you're on the run from US authorities.
Argentina on the first glance would look “safe” to me, as South American nations seem in general not very pro-US. Live and learn, I guess. TIL that all South American countries have these extradition agreements.
I feel bad for the arrested; even if their values were not pristine. Punishments for these kind of “offences” seem extremely harsh to me, being grown in a copyright-unaware climate.
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#69TorrentFreak report has some extra details - https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-indicts-two-russians-for-runnin...
Re: Z-library founders arrested in Argentina
#70I know this won't be a popular take on HN, but while I can understand and to a certain extent sympathize with pirating movies (the intentional friction and arbitrary geographic limitations on access imposed by the multinational movie-industry conglomerates), I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light. Sure, people get hung-up about DRM (which can easily be removed by widely-accessible tools), but…
I think we can have our cake and eat it too.