Library Genesis (LibGen) is one of the oldest shadow libraries on the Internet, offering free access to millions of books and academic papers people otherwise have to pay for.
The site's origins reportedly trace back to the Soviet Union's underground publishing culture 'samizdat,' which was used to bypass state censorship in the last century.
LibGen launched around 2008 as a digital version of the same concept. In addition to bypassing censorship, it's widely used to circumvent the paywalls of major international publishing companies, serving as a popular 'pirate' site for books and academic works.
In recent years, rightsholders have made several attempts to shut the site down. Through court orders, LibGen is now blocked in several countries but taking the operation permanently offline has proven quite the challenge, not least since the identities of its operators are unknown.
In 2017, Elsevier won a court case against LibGen and Sci-Hub in a New York federal court, which awarded the publisher $15 million in damages. However, both shadow libraries remained online and continue to operate to this day.
Publishers vs. LibGen
Hoping for a better outcome, textbook publishers Cengage, Bedford, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education filed a similar copyright infringement lawsuit against LibGen last year. According to the plaintiffs, LibGen is responsible for "staggering" levels of copyright infringement.
Months have passed since the complaint was filed but LibGen's anonymous operators did not respond. This prompted the textbook publishers to move ahead and request a default judgment in their favor.
According to the rightsholders, LibGen distributes at least 20,000 of their copyrighted works without permission. The site is designed to be user-friendly while remaining resilient to enforcement measures.
For example, LibGen can easily switch domain names, and relies on censorship-resistant decentralized technologies such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), the publishers write.
By making textbooks available to students for free, rightsholders are losing revenue, which leads to lower payments for authors and devalues the market as a whole, the publishers complain.
$30 Million in Damages
With a default judgment, the textbook publishers hope to obtain an injunction that will limit LibGen's ability to operate. The plaintiffs also request compensation for the damage suffered thus far.
The rightsholders propose maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for 200 copyrighted works, arriving at a total damages claim of $30 million. Since this amount represents just a small subset of all infringements, the request is reasonable, the publishers note.
"This damages award is a fraction of what it could be if this case were litigated and the full scope of Defendants' infringement revealed," the publishers note.
In addition to financial compensation, the damages award should also be sufficient to act as a deterrent to others. LibGen has a dedicated following and an eventual order should provide a clear signal to those people too.
"Defendants are among the worst offenders in a growing online piracy crisis affecting publishers. Thus, a significant damage award is needed to deter Defendants and others who are engaged in the commission and facilitation of digital piracy," the publishers write.
Compel IPFS Gateways
Even if the court grants the damages award, collecting money from LibGen's unidentified operators will be a challenge. For this reason, the publishers are also asking the court to issue an injunction that will compel others to stop providing services to LibGen.
The plaintiffs describe this aspect as "critical" and specifically mention IPFS in the context. IPFS files can be accessed through various means, including dedicated gateways, which are offered by external companies such as Protocol Labs, Pinata Technologies, and Cloudflare.
The first two gateway providers have disabled URLs in response to takedown requests, but Cloudflare allegedly failed to take action.
"Cloudflare did not disable the gateway URLs in Plaintiffs' notice, prompting Plaintiffs to send additional notices in September 2023 and January 2024, on which Cloudflare still has not acted, resulting in Libgen users' continued ability to access the infringing URLs," the publishers write.
Broad 'Non-party' Injunction
If the court issues a broad injunction that applies to non-party services such as Cloudflare, the plaintiffs believe that will limit the illicit distribution of its copyrighted works.
The request isn't limited to IPFS gateways, of course. The proposed injunction also mentions hosting services, search engines, proxy services, CDNs, donation platforms, browser extensions, social media, payment providers, and advertising services, among others.
None of these services should be allowed to "enable, facilitate, permit, assist, solicit, encourage, induce, participate with, or act in concert with" the infringement of the publishers' copyrighted works.
Finally, the proposed injunction would also require domain registries and domain registrars to suspend and hand over all infringing domains to the textbook publishers. This applies to all existing domains, but also new ones that may pop up later.
LibGen Troubles?
Needless to say, LibGen's ability to operate will be seriously hampered if the court agrees to issue the proposed order and injunction. It directly puts domain names at risk, especially those that are connected to U.S.-based registrars or registries.
While LibGen remains online today, the site appears to have some internal struggles. The person in charge of the site's coding has reportedly been missing in action for a while, which resulted in broken functionality.
For example, there are various upload-related troubles, and searching the database regularly results in errors too. In addition, new torrents were not added regularly for a while.
Whether LibGen can solve all these issues is unclear, but the recent legal trouble will only make the site's future more uncertain.
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A copy of the publishers' proposed order and injunction is available here (pdf) and the associated memorandum can be found here (pdf)
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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