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ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

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Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#231

Post by mvkg »

pilimi_anna wrote: post #103
sixtyfourbits wrote: post #48

Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923 Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits. Hopefully this will…

Holy shit! Did not see this coming, but glad we saved this collection just in time. (I'm Anna, the one who made the backup). We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at http://pilimi.org (we'll set up a patreon-like system soon)

You mirror Z-Library but don't support TLS on any of your sites. This seems like an odd choice. What is your threat model?

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#232

Post by flyingsky »

bawolff wrote: post #160
sixtyfourbits wrote: post #48

Fortunately someone had the foresight to make a backup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32972923 Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits. Hopefully this will…

> Z-library were in it for commercial gain (you could access a certain number of books but to get more you had to pay for a subscription). They started out as a fork of library genesis, whose mission has always been strictly non-commercial and about providing free access to everyone without limits. Ick. I'm sympathetic to piracy, but the moment people start to make money off of pirated works it starts to feel much mo…

> [...] but the moment people start to make money off of pirated works it starts to feel much more wrong.

"Piracy" is expensive! Most people do not donate to support these things it's understandable if they decide to charge a few cents or bucks to keep the light on.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#233

Post by unfolding »

areoform wrote: post #220
pilimi_anna wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy shit! Did not see this coming, but glad we saved this collection just in time. (I'm Anna, the one who made the backup). We are working on hosting this collection, as well as saving other large collections. Please consider supporting us, donation details at http://pilimi.org (we'll set up a patreon-like system soon)

Thank you so much for your efforts! I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it. Something that, - is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion) - requires no power - doesn't require software to read/reboot from - (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years Copying from the Long Now Foundation's projects, I think we can achieve the…

1 billion years is a long time. would a metallic alloy last a billion years? maybe we are better carving it into stone

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#234

Post by 1dry »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #211
1dry wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Personally, I use libgen to check if I actually want a given book, and if I do, I buy it (a physical copy, if possible). So, for me, it's a kind of a virtual bookshop.

That's great of you to buy the book as well, major kudos. I would bet most are not as altruistic as you.

Do not traditional libraries and their ebook lending systems, however inconvenient, provide the same service? All one needs to do is be patient until the book you are interested in becomes available. In the meantime, maybe you can check out a different book that is available that you might not have discovered otherwise!

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#235

Post by approxim8ion »

albert_e wrote: post #124
synergy20 wrote: post #66

All books should now have a link or paypal email at the back book cover so whoever read the book without pay, then find it useful and valuable, to have an effective way to send money over. yeah it's not ideal but, there might be quite some readers pay if they know how to do that easily.

But that would encourage pirates to create fake recipients (that sound very similar to original) to channel money into their own pockets. With this incentive one can invest effort in high quality scans or OCR, well-formatted ebooks (pirated), and replace that last lime of text with own ID and flood the internet with these copies.

I suppose then we would need systems to verify that your payment is going to the intended recipient. Sure, that can be spoofed non-trivially too, but I'm sure it's possible to make it good enough without being perfect.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#236

Post by skissane »

notch656a wrote: post #222
skissane wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What do they have to do with ebooks?? I think legally they can investigate whatever (alleged) crimes they want – subject to the outcome of any turf wars with other government agencies. Their official purpose may be to investigate one particular category of crimes, but it is unlikely any court is going to throw out a prosecution because the "wrong" agency gathered the evidence. Government agencies are frequently try…

Authorizing funding is the responsibility of the legislative branch. Wouldn't the agencies, which are executive, need to follow the prescription of congress on use of funds to investigate?

Yes. But how restrictively does Congress word its appropriations to agencies, such as the US Postal Inspection Service? If it appropriates them money "to investigate crimes", that would entitle them to spend that money on investigating any category of crime at all (including those with no clear connection to the postal service.) I haven't read the relevant appropriations and authorizations acts, so I don't know how they are actually worded.

Also, even supposing a criminal investigation was in violation of the appropriations laws (money appropriated to investigate one type of crime being illegally redirected to investigate another type of crime instead), that (as far as I know–IANAL) isn't an issue the accused has standing to raise in court.

A (possibly) real example of this happened under the Clinton and Obama administrations, when Republicans in Congress tried to appropriate money specifically to prosecute adult pornography, and the Justice Department (allegedly) illegally spent a lot of it on child pornography prosecutions instead. But even supposing the allegation is true, it was of no legal benefit to the accused.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#237

Post by faeriechangling »

dfxm12 wrote: post #55
jrm4 wrote: post #22

As a lawyer, I can't recommend it, but I absolutely cannot discern any moral difference whatsoever between reading a library book for free and purchasing it later if I like it, and doing the same first thing by downloading the ebook from somewhere "unapproved." It's all very silly.

If a book (even an ebook) is in the library, it's already bought and paid for so the author gets whatever compensation they get as if it is a normal sale. I don't think arguing morals makes sense because of how subjective one's morals are, but, by using libraries, you are supporting the arts, whether you liked the book or not, and this is not a silly distinction.

End the intellectual property monopolies, and instead give organizations the right to distribute creative works so long as downloads are tracked through some robust means, and then compensate authors accordingly.

Don’t outlaw libraries just because the internet now exists or legalize them but only with absurdities like fucking wait lists.

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#238

Post by gbil »

Scoundreller wrote: post #4

This link doesn’t explain much. And at least in Canada, doesn’t show any seizure notice.

But it shows a block notice coming from Greece with the local message from the local copyright organization. This is really interesting, seems like there is a global list that local organizations also use and ask ISPs to do DNS redirections

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#239

Post by areoform »

gilded-lilly wrote: post #223
areoform wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much for your efforts! I have steadily become convinced that we should make a multi-billion year backup of all of humanity's knowledge. All of it. Something that, - is resilient (can survive a nuclear explosion) - requires no power - doesn't require software to read/reboot from - (theoretically) lasts for at least 1 billion years Copying from the Long Now Foundation's projects, I think we can achieve the…

Why not encode them microscopically, using some kind of easily decipherable code? The main issue would be loss of language. You’d end up with a gigantic Rosetta Stone of indecipherable gibberish. Better would be to convert all literature into hieroglyphics, or graphic novels (or both), and then etch them microscopically.

This size will have microscopic features! There is probably a balance between ease of scanning/technological sophistication required to see the pages, cost of etching, and the number of plates overall.

The Long Now Foundation has extensively studied the language loss problem and arrived at a fairly elegant set of solutions.

https://longnow.org/ideas/02022/01/20/linguistic-data-in-the...

Re: ZLibrary domains have been seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service

#240

Post by [deleted] »

ZoF wrote: post #74
elil17 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my local library already owns the book and it is not checked out, what is the difference between driving there to check it out and downloading it illegally online? The impact to the author is the same: absolutely nothing.

It's nothing in isolation of your single act. Maybe. In aggregate it of course deprecates the library(they have e-checkouts already but you're talking untracked piracy). I like libraries; I think they're mostly performative in small towns and providing social services in cities rather than functioning as actual libraries. Kinda sad. I pirate all my books btw, just saying if everyone did it ofc there'd be(already is)…

[deleted]
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