
The Burning of Library.nu (2014) - dongping
https://knowledgeutopia.wordpress.com/2014/01/22/the-burning-of-library-nu/
======
unixhero
There were worse "burns" than this. 1M books is now fairly easily obtainable
over a 6 month obsessive hunt on the Internet.

The real Library Of Alexandria - of Music - was shut down, WHAT.CD . The way
everything there was curated, level of quality and global community, is hard
to describe, grasp and convey here.

It was so good that artists, released their stuff there, first. For free, to
get coverage, and it worked.

~~~
aaaaaaaaaab
The successor of what.cd have been going well though.

~~~
Biganon
Only 30 000 members though, and it's not increasing anymore.

------
joel_ms
The damage done to human culture by our current copyright enforcement regime
is heartbreaking.

We have to means to make human cultural output accessible to unprecedented
numbers of people around the world, but we don't, largely because it would
interrupt the flow of money to incumbent rent-seekers.

~~~
DoctorOetker
imagine sci-hub is intimidated out of business some date in the future... we
would come to regret not making backups, but the size is too large at least
60+TB last I checked. Let's say 60GB were feasible for an average individual.
So now we need a decentralized way to ensure we have division of
responsibility. How do we divide the labor?

Suppose everyone downloads all the articles for which the hash converted to
decimal modulo (3 * 365) equals the user's ((birthyear % 3) * 365+birthday)

Then if a few ten thousand participate, we'd have a backup

Something crazy I didn't know, in the article:

>In France, on January 13, 1535, a law was enacted (at the request of the
Catholic Church) which forced the closure of all bookshops and stipulated
death penalty by hanging for anybody using a printing press.

~~~
cmrx64
[http://iabak.archiveteam.org/](http://iabak.archiveteam.org/)

~~~
DoctorOetker
I don't think the internet archive backs up sci-hub

------
sandov
As an avid user of libgen.io, I would not be able to express my sadness if it
shut down.

~~~
notatoad
Libgen seems to have plenty of mirrors - if there's one good thing about high
profile shutdowns like library.nu or what.cd it's that it tends to distribute
these libraries out across more surface and make them harder to kill

~~~
anonymous5133
I think there are archive copies that can be downloaded in the forum.

------
armitron
The article claims: "There is no legal nor illegal alternative to it as of
today."

That is absolutely not true. Libgen and Scihub have been with us for years,
massively eclipse library.nu on content, and do not seem to be going anywhere
anytime soon. Moreover a cursory look over their operational TTPs definitely
shows competence and familiarity with best practices (unlike library.nu) which
I guess explains why they're still going strong.

~~~
userbinator
"Today" as in 2014, possibly Libgen/Scihub were not yet as well known nor
large at the time.

AvaxHome is another lesser-known Russian one, but I suspect all the material
eventually ends up in Libgen.

~~~
unixhero
Does AvaxHome still operate? Noice! I helped me immensely during my days in
academia.

------
qwerty456127
I hope somebody has backed everything up and would eventually upload to
alternative places. I actually wonder why don't people open the websites like
that one in i2p or TOR.

~~~
votepaunchy
Was Library.nu folded into LibGen?

~~~
sitkack
I believe it was.

------
guidovranken
The article makes many lofty claims about how knowledge must be free, but how
can books continue to be put out if you disincentivize the authors? What's in
it for them? Had I been an expert on a niche technical or academic subject in
the eighties or nineties I might have published a book on it. These days,
certainly not.

~~~
MikeTaylor
I am an academic, with about 25 scholarly publications, depending on how you
count them (see
[http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/](http://www.miketaylor.org.uk/dino/pubs/)
for a list and for links to download them). I am here to tell you that we DO
NOT GET PAID for writing papers (which, much more than books, are the primary
medium of research in the sciences). Of the 25 listed papers, I got paid
something for one of them, which was not really research but activism -- and I
was paid by the acdvocacy group, not by a publisher. For some of the papers on
the list, _I_ paid the _publisher_: this is not unusual.

There is literally no downside for an academic author to have his or or her
work made freely available to the world: only the considerable upside of
greatly increased visibility and influence -- which is the true currency of
academia.

~~~
matt4077
You do get paid for books, however. So you’re just so slightly missing the
point.

~~~
barry-cotter
Academics may get paid an advance for textbooks, some of which will earn out
their advance, an even smaller portion of which will go to a second edition,
an even smaller portion of which will make their author some serious money.

For the overwhelming majority of books published by academics that are not
textbooks fewer than 5,000 will ever be printed and that’s being really
generous. They’re academic books, written for academic readers and the only
people who make any money on them are the publishers.

------
lentan1029
shhh... [http://sci-hub.tw](http://sci-hub.tw)

------
josh_fyi
What is the difference between libgen.io and b-ok.org? They both seem to be in
the Library Genesis family yet not just mirrors of each other -- for example,
there are some books that I can find on b-ok.org but not by libgen.io.

------
jancsika
Were the contents turned into what is now Scihub? Or put in a torrent that
currently has seeders?

If the answer to both questions is "no" then the md5 of my response is
0646520533421d268d918384b0980da6

------
scarcely
Downloading books and articles from libgen is technically "theft of
intellectual property". So is torrenting proprietary software, music, etc.

I'm often surprised to observe the extent to which Americans, both inside and
outside of academia, and regardless of their station in life, overtly engage
in this form of 'IP theft', given how much anger there is these days at China
for alleged IP theft (I'm granting for the sake of argument that the
allegations are fully accurate).

Why don't Americans find this form of 'IP theft' equally ethically
problematic? I suspect the answer is some combination of:

(i) deep down people don't really feel that 'big evil publishers' like
Springer, Kluwer etc really deserve all that money; we are less likely to feel
bad about 'stealing' from someone if we don't feel that the person from whom
we are taking the thing away is morally entitled to it.

(ii) $30 per article etc is just too expensive and impractical. Paying is not
a consistently followable policy, so we may as well consistent pirate.

To the extent that 'Chinese theft of intellectual property' occurs, can it be
attributed to the same motivations?

Some analogue of (i) arguably obtains. After all, Americans committed two of
the biggest thefts in human history: first the entire continent stolen from
the natives, then, entire human lives stolen from generations of black people.
So much of America's present-day prosperity and advantage can be chalked up to
these two egregious acts of theft, neither of which they have remotely
adequately compensated for. Obviously you can't return something you stole
from some person (people) if you killed him (most of them). And the idea of
reparation for slavery has never gained mainstream acceptance. The example
this sets is "let's steal with abandon, after all our descedents can play the
'I was no part of that' defense just like present-day Americans".

As for (ii), I'm not entirely sure. Has anyone ever looked into just how much
money a Chinese company would have to pay if it were to fully comply with
intellectual property laws? I find it hard to imagine it _not_ being just as
exhorbitant as Springer, Kluwer etc, in many cases.

~~~
Dylan16807
I can solve your dilemma easily. Don't use the phrase "Intellectual Property".
Use "copyright" and "trade secret" to refer to those two separate concepts.

"Chinese theft of intellectual property" is all about trade secrets, something
completely unrelated to copyright.

(There's also a distinction between violating copyright for yourself, and
violating copyright to sell copies of something, but I don't think you meant
bootlegging so we don't need to address that right now.)

~~~
scarcely
Can you explain the moral relevance of that distinction - the reason one kind
of theft of intellectual property is morally less bad than the other.

One idea is this: stealing trade secret is "active theft" whereas stealing
copyright is "passive theft". You do not need to leave your house in order to
steal someone's copyright. By contrast, to steal closely guarded trade secrets
you practically must conduct espionage. So this form of theft reminds us more
of real world robbery. We are apt to consider the victim physically violated
(by comparison, the idea that by downloading some pdfs from libgen while
sitting at home in bathrobes we've 'physically violated' Springer obviously
sounds very odd)

If that's the response then my reply is twofold. First, just because something
is more 'graphical' doesn't mean it's morally worse. For example, many
omnivores tend to consider people who eat dogs and cats to be especially evil.
On reflection, they realize that they have no principled basis for judging
themselves to be morally superior to the dog- and cat-eaters. The only reason
their initially reacted as they did was because they found the imagery of
eating dogs and cats much more graphical, since dogs and cats are such cute
animals. But cuteness is not (as most people would agree) a morally relevant
difference.

It's also worth pointing out that stealing trade secret is more graphical than
stealing copyright only because of contingent technological reasons. If we
lived before xerox machines, stealing books may require making efforts not
that different from physical robbery.

Second, I want to point out that you haven't really responded to the substance
of my point. My point was that perhaps the Chinese is unconcerned about their
'theft of intellectual property (trade secret)' for the same reason many
Americans are unconcerned about their 'theft of intellectual property
(copyright)': because "it's not theft to steal something from those who aren't
entitled to it". Simply pointing to the distinction between 'trade secret' and
'copyright' is not yet pointing to a distinction that makes an obvious
difference. If the point is simply "stealing trade secret is obviously _much
worse_ than stealing copyright, because trade secrets are closely guarded, so
you need to basically pry them away from the victim", then (i) see my first
reply above and (ii) note that the two acts of theft I stated in my original
post, because they involve literal acts of physical violence, is obviously
much more 'graphical' than any industrial espionage.

~~~
Dylan16807
> Can you explain the moral relevance of that distinction - the reason one
> kind of theft of intellectual property is morally less bad than the other.

Two different crimes don't have to be strictly better or worse to get
different reactions. But scale and profit are big factors here.

Anyway, I don't think it's active vs. passive at all. Your original point (i)
was much better. The person asking for money _didn 't make the science, and
isn't using that money to fund more science_.

The Chinese "IP theft" is copying from someone that made it, is using it, and
isn't interested in selling it. It's a violation of privacy, not just "IP".

> "it's not theft to steal something from those aren't entitled to it"

What's 'it' here, exactly? It can't be payment, because there's no price in
the first place. But it's hard to argue that someone that developed a tech
isn't entitled to the tech... If 'it' is exclusivity, that's a valid
worldview, but it doesn't quite address the issue of using fraudulent means to
get access.

They're such very different actions that I don't see any point in bundling
them together.

But if you _do_ insist on bundling, then you need to address how a pirate is
making a personal copy, and a company copying tech is on a completely
different level.

> note that the two acts of theft I stated in my original post

I have noted them. They are bad. I'm with the other responder in ignoring any
attempts at whataboutism, so this note is irrelevant to anything else in the
post. (Also china's performing extremely similar crimes, so it's a weird tack
to use those as some kind of _hypothetical_ comparison.)

~~~
scarcely
(i) Imagine a billionaire who acquired his fortune from pyramid schemes. One
day he fell victim to someone else's scam and is left penniless. He goes to
confront the scammer to demand his money back. The scammer admits to carrying
out the scam, but points out to the former billionaire that the money stolen
from him was stolen in the first place. "That's just whataboutism," the former
billionaire protests indignantly, "just because I did something bad in the
past doesn't give you the right to do bad things to me".

Do you see the problem with the former billionaire's response?

(ii) To describe trade secrets as "science" sounds incorrect (I would reserve
the term for the kind of stuff published in science journals, that genuinely
tries to push the boundaries of human knowledge).

(iii) The kind of trade secret you are referring to are much more like source
codes for proprietary software. You are sold some device that does a certain
job. However, how exactly it does this job, is kept from your knowledge,
because if you know it you would be able to make copies of it yourself, which
would hurt the bottom line of the party selling the device. A more homespun
example is KFC's recipe for their fried chicken. If the secret recipe is
known, people would be able to make their KFC-flavor fried chicken at home.
They wouldn't need to visit KFC to get it.

(iv) once we see that the "trade secrets" alluded to are things like closed
source software's source code, and KFC's secret recipe, one thing that should
immediately come to mind is the entire free software movement, the most
prominent spokesman of which has repeatedly argued that proprietary software
is "evil". Is it really okay to sell things that is promised to do a certain
job but _how_ it does that job is not being revealed? Would we ever allow drug
manufacturers to sell drugs that promise to cure some condition via
undisclosed mechanism? How do we know the closed source software isn't spying
on us? Etc.

(v) Moreover, it becomes obvious at this point, that the only difference
between the libgen type of cases and the "trade secret" cases is the
difference in how easy it is to make copies. If you have a physical book or an
ebook or an mp3, it's trivially easy to make an identical copy. But if you
have a piece of KFC fried chicken in front of you, that in itself is of no
help if you want a second helping. You can't just xerox the fried chicken, you
need the recipe. And if the recipe is being locked away in some secret cabinet
and you absolutely need it, then you need to steal it. But then this seems to
suggest that those who pirate books have little basis on which to claim moral
superiority to those who steal recipes/source codes. At the end of the day,
_they are both making unauthorized copies_. The only difference is that the
pirares are much more fortunate in that they have a much easier time making
copies than the thieves stealing trade secrets. But is that a morally
significant difference? How can it be that crime A is morally less bad than
crime B simply because A is __easier to commit __?

~~~
Dylan16807
(i) If we want a fair analogy, it's not _the same money_. It would have to be
money he legitimately earned decades later that was stolen. In which case he's
got a point.

3-4 All this does is help explain how copyright and trade secrets are _not the
same thing_.

> How can it be that crime A is morally less bad than crime B simply because A
> is easier to commit?

It's not just ease, it's A) whether it involves privacy violations and fraud,
B) the nature of the use _after_ making the copy.

