Z-library founders arrested in Argentina

I think you need to specify what context you're talking in.

Do you see it as... 1. Criminal 2. Immoral 3. Having downsides

I think we agree it's not criminal (as scale doesn't apply to a binary criminality judgement stealing a penny is as criminal as stealing a pound though punishment will vary).

Are you suggesting it's immoral? Because I can't see where you make such an argument.

Or are you saying well it has downsides as authors may earn less? It's likely book purchases are affected by libraries. I don't think the effect is as profound as people think.

Without that context it's quite hard to discuss this topic.

They could have lowered the price in the us enough to not make it worth getting a cheapo version which the quality is frequently worse. What many did instead was to lower the quality and sell at high prices, in many cases books have poor binding, poor print and editing and so on.

What I was always wondering about, given they are clearly illegal, why did they bother adhering to book take down requests (and pointing out you could still access the book in question via Tor...)? Was there some jurisdiction out there where that made them legal?

> I can't see stealing some poor author's work in the same light.

I sympathize with this sentiment. I have writers in my family.

Anyone who wants to be making money in writing is either (1) doing something else, like being a celebrity, and selling a book directly to their pre-existing audience (2) writing for TV, movies or went to law school. So few authors make money on their books, that the existence (or non-existence) of piracy has no impact on the aggregate experience of authors.

> if we don't buy their books

The truth is there is no audience for the vast majority of paid-up-front books, games, movies, music or other creative media. There is a large audience for TikToks. Part of the journey is coming to terms with this. The reality is people are writing because they like to, and the money doesn't matter, and the piracy doesn't matter, and they are not on Hacker News complaining about it anyway.

That said, I believe these sentiments, expressed elsewhere, about being American and being poor or whatever. The commenters have limited empathy and bandwidth.

(Hypothetically)

Couldn’t this concept be built out in a much more decentralized way, where there’s a desktop app you install that is basically a BitTorrent client and a search interface, and then the app synchronizes with all other desktop apps to keep a SQLite database updated with all of the book meta data, and then each user also contributes some amount of disk space (let’s say 1gb) that the app automatically manages storing some amount of the network’s book files in (maybe even encrypted somehow, or fragments of book files, so you never actually have a complete file on any given machine).

So basically a big torrent mesh with redundant, fragmented storage of book files everywhere. People can upload a book, the app shreds it up and broadcasts to the network, enough other apps sync those fragments on their end to make it “permanently” on the network (statistically at least).

The metadata can’t possibly be that big for a million books in a SQLite database. Users would search against their local SQLite DB, and for a book they want to download, it’s just normal BitTorrent downloads in the background. Run it all through TOR or similar.

Thoughts? I am only a user of all of the above tech, never written software for any of it. Is it possible to build a distributed and resilient file sharing system like this?