Misplaced Pages

#4995

38-860: Library Genesis ( LibGen ) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. LibGen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users". LibGen provides access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content from Elsevier 's ScienceDirect web-portal. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of internet piracy . Others assert that academic publishers unfairly benefit from government-funded research, written by researchers, many of whom are employed by public universities, and that LibGen

76-613: A Lelystad court ordered the ISPs to block The Pirate Bay. In March 2021, the BREIN employee Bastiaan van Ramshorst sent a copy of the blocking order against TPB to Google , although the company had not been named in it. In November 2021, BREIN and the Dutch Copyright Federation concluded an official covenant -type agreement with six ISPs (Ziggo, KPN, Delta Fiber , T-Mobile , Canal+ and NLConnect), negotiated with

114-454: A criminal offense . There are currently no settled cases determining whether it is permissible by academics to directly provide links to shadow libraries, though threats of legal action by academic publishers regarding such references have occurred in isolated incidents. Legal action against researchers remains uncommon. Although most academics are not penalized for distributing their published works independently and freely (therefore obviating

152-600: A civil court case which BREIN filed in the Netherlands against the founders of The Pirate Bay, on 22 October 2009 the Amsterdam District Court ruled that The Pirate Bay was not making a direct infringement but its facilitating activities amount to an unlawful act. The Court ordered The Pirate Bay to remove a list of torrents that link to copyright-protected works in the Netherlands and to make these torrents on its websites inaccessible for Internet users in

190-659: A compensation for process costs. On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis , based on a request by BREIN. After a series of allegations that Usenet community Fill Threads Database (FTD) was acting illegally, the Dutch FTD started a lawsuit against BREIN in May 2009. BREIN president Tim Kuik alleged in a Dutch newspaper that "Although they [FTD] are not carrying illegal content on their servers, what FTD does

228-583: A concerted international movement, known as the Open Access movement, to make academic knowledge free or very inexpensive. The Open Access movement strives to establish both journals that are free to access (known as open access journals ) and free-to-access repositories of academic journal papers published elsewhere. However, many open access journals require academics to pay fees to be published in an open access journal, which disincentivizes academics from publishing in such journals. A third reason for

266-575: A conference there. By the time of its publication in summer 1999 under the changed title Piracy in Russia: An Epidemic , Kuik was listed as the General Director of BREIN. On 30 July 2009, an Amsterdam civil law court ruled in favour of BREIN in its lawsuit over copyright infringement against the three alleged operators of The Pirate Bay (TPB), who were not officially summoned by the court. In August 2009, Kuik addressed

304-724: A joint venture between Paramount Pictures and Universal Pictures which represented a change in policy from attempts to ban VHS , and led MPA's anti-piracy activities in Europe from 1992, which included interventions in Hungary and Bulgaria . Before leaving Los Angeles, on 21 February 1998 he presented a paper titled How the East Was Won: Legal Aspects of the Entertainment Business in Russia at

342-525: A judge from the United States of America ordered the owner of LibGen to pay publishers $ 30M, but no one knows who runs it. LibGen is reported to be registered in both Russia and the Netherlands, making the appropriate jurisdiction for legal action unclear. LibGen is blocked by a number of ISPs in the United Kingdom, but such DNS -based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access. It

380-581: A project to better seed and host LibGen's data dumps . The project's spokesperson and coordinator 'shrine' described the effort as a way for a "permanent library card for the world" and reported that the response has been "overwhelmingly positive from everyone". In 2020, the project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of content on Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using IPFS . Shadow library Examples of shadow libraries include Anna's Archive , Library Genesis , Sci-Hub and Z-Library , which are popular book and academic shadow libraries and may be

418-898: Is also blocked by ISPs in France , Germany , Greece , Italy , Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage), and Russia (in November 2018). On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, based on a request by BREIN , a local anti-piracy group. Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub , which provides free access to millions of research papers and books, relied on LibGen as storage. Papers requested by users were requested from LibGen and served from there if available, otherwise they were fetched by other means and then stored on LibGen. In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched

SECTION 10

#1732790499005

456-486: Is helping to disseminate research that should be freely available in the first place. Library Genesis has roots in the illegal underground samizdat culture in the Soviet Union. As access to printing in the Soviet Union was strictly controlled and censored, dissident intellectuals would hand-copy and retype manuscripts for secret circulation. This was legalized under Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in

494-431: Is made available. According to one study from Cornell University, articles that are on Sci-Hub receive 1.72 times as many citations as articles from journals of similar quality that are not available on Sci-Hub. Content hosted by some shadow libraries may be hosted without the consent of the original owners of the material. This may make some shadow libraries illegal ; however, as researchers are not required to disclose

532-484: Is simply criminal". FTD is suing for a retraction of this libelous statement and demands a declaration from the courts that its activities are entirely within the law. On February 9, 2011, the Dutch District Court of Haarlem ruled, that FTD had acted unlawfully and issued an injunction. FTD was obliged to ban all references to files of BREIN members. The court also ruled that Tim Kuik was free to expose

570-547: The Hacking at Random conference on the future of copyright laws and was confronted by TPB's founder Gottfrid Svartholm over his allegations that TPB is run for profit. Kuik was unable to substantiate his claims. In October 2012, BREIN won a landmark case in The Hague against the Dutch hosting service provider XS Networks, which had refused to shut down a torrent -based file sharing site at BREIN's request and hand over

608-472: The Netherlands , which represents the interests of the Dutch entertainment industry and is organised under the Dutch law through the legal form of stichting . It is notable for launching court proceedings against copyright infringement in the country and for engaging in lobbying in order to create legal precedents of global significance. BREIN brings together organizations or rights holders in

646-530: The 1980s, and expanded very rapidly at a time of affordable desktop computers and scanners, and very small research budgets. The volunteers moved into the Russian computer network ("RuNet") in the 1990s, which became awash with hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated contributions. Librarians became especially active, using borrowed access passwords to download copies of scientific and scholarly articles from Western Internet sources, then uploading them to RuNet. In

684-588: The Netherlands. The Pirate Bay ignored the verdict. In January 2012 BREIN announced that a Dutch court had ordered Ziggo and XS4ALL to block all access to The Pirate Bay . On May 10, 2012 this judgement was followed by a court order of the District Court in The Hague against UPC, KPN, T-Mobile and Tele2 to also block The Pirate Bay for their customers. Ziggo and XS4ALL appealed this verdict and won, with BREIN being ordered to pay 326,000 Euro as

722-538: The admins accused Elsevier of gaining most of its profits from publicly funded research which should be freely available to all as they are paid for by taxpayers. In late October 2015, the District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LibGen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org), but the site is accessible through alternate domains. On September 26th, 2024,

760-406: The complete news archive was still available. (A password was later added to BREIN's news archive to prevent further checks on availability.) On 23 June 2009 The Pirate Bay announced a lawsuit against Tim Kuik on libel charges, claiming The Pirate Bay had nothing to do with the alleged DDoS attack. In September 2009 BREIN CEO Tim Kuik attracted controversy when in a news conference he stated he

798-450: The conduct of FTD and communicate the opinion of BREIN. The request for rectification was therefore rejected by the court. FTD ceased all its operations a few weeks after the verdict. On 1 June 2009 Tim Kuik published an online article claiming BREIN's website was "broken" by hackers performing DDoS attacks. He speculated about a possible connection with the intended court summons against The Pirate Bay. Several independent sources reported

SECTION 20

#1732790499005

836-541: The content available to the public because they did not have control over the content itself and they did not interfere in the up- and downloading process. However, the Court of Appeal ruled that the site was illegal because their procedure made it easier for users to retrieve the illegal content from the eDonkey network. On October 23, 2007 BREIN, together with IFPI , BPI , Dutch police, and other organizations shut down prominent Bittorrent tracker Oink's Pink Palace . In

874-630: The early 21st century, the efforts became coordinated, and integrated into one massive system known as Library Genesis, or LibGen, around 2008. It subsequently absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to, library.nu , which was shut down by legal action in 2012. By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of library.nu with 1.2 million records. As of 28 July 2019, Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues. In 2020,

912-614: The entertainment industry, such as film and recording studios. Those are amongst others: Tim (Timotheus Jacobus ) Kuik, a law graduate of the University of Amsterdam (1982), oversaw the activities of BREIN from its inception. He assumed leadership of BREIN in 1999 after returning to his native Netherlands from Los Angeles , where he had headed the Motion Picture Association 's global anti-piracy programme from 1996. He had originally worked for CIC Video ,

950-430: The establishment of shadow libraries is the tacit endorsement by many academics of such efforts. Academics are rarely compensated by publishers for their work, regardless of whether their work is published in an open access journal or a conventionally priced journal. Thus, there is now little incentive for academics to disavow shadow libraries. Furthermore, shadow libraries greatly increase the impact of academics whose work

988-543: The evidence provided by BREIN, the case was not put to trial for several years. After being offline for two years, ShareConnector reopened in December 2006 but on November 12, 2007, Shareconnector went offline again. On March 16, 2010 the Amsterdam Court of Appeal ruled that sites that offer hash links (like .torrent links) were facilitating copyright infringement, an unlawful behavior. Shareconnector did not make

1026-584: The existing blocklist under the 2021 covenant. The court issued a dynamic blocking order covering all future domains. In April 2024, Kuik retired and was replaced by Bastiaan van Ramshorst, a business law graduate (2000) and a member of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property , who joined BREIN around 2010 and whom Kuik had prepared as his successor over the previous ten years. In an interview given on

1064-457: The largest public libraries for books and literature. One of the goals of shadow libraries is to more readily disseminate academic content, especially papers from academic journals. Academic literature has become increasingly expensive, as costs to access information created by scholars have risen dramatically in recent years, especially the cost of books. The term serials crisis has emerged to describe this ongoing trend. There has also been

1102-495: The means by which they access academic material, it is difficult to monitor the use of illegally accessed academic papers. Not all authors agree with trying to compromise access to shadow libraries. The legality of directing individuals to shadow libraries is broadly undetermined. There is currently no consensus among legal authorities in the United States and Europe as to what extent advertising shadow libraries constitutes

1140-510: The need for shadow libraries in the first place), there are reports of academic publishers threatening such academics with legal action. Shadow libraries (or their content databases) make use of BitTorrent (mainly for database dumps), dark web and IPFS technologies to increase their resilience or distribute loads. In the case of Anna's Archive , the software is developed and made accessible as open source software , enabling code development by any volunteer and mirrors or forks , with

1178-406: The occasion of his retirement, Kuik admitted that the business model behind Netflix , Spotify and Napster largely derives from the copyright-infringing streaming services BREIN has sought to close down. BREIN is known for shutting down Dutch eDonkey 2000 link giant ShareConnector in December 2004. Due to controversy over the legality of links to illegal content, and a lack of quality in

Library Genesis - Misplaced Pages Continue

1216-501: The personal details of its owner to BREIN. The court found XS Network liable for damages for copyright infringement and ordered it to disclose information about the site owner. The ruling was seen as a precedent in that it held hosting providers legally responsible for not complying with requests of industry interest groups in advance of a court order. In October 2020, BREIN won its ten-year-long lawsuit against three internet service providers (ISPs) – Ziggo , KPN and XS4ALL – when

1254-415: The project was forked under an alternate domain, "libgen.fun", due to internal conflict within the project. As a result, databases are being maintained independently and content differs between libgen.fun and other LibGen domains. In 2015, Library Genesis became involved in a legal case with Elsevier , which accused it of copyright infringement and granting free access to articles and books. In response,

1292-631: The site claiming that "if we get taken down we'll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data is fully open source". BREIN The Bescherming Rechten Entertainment Industrie Nederland ( Dutch for '(Foundation for the) Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands';; abbreviated as BREIN , 'Brain') is an advocacy group with international links, based in

1330-465: The site's deep links were still available (only the frontpage was inaccessible) and as such BREIN's claim of having been attacked was false. Brein responded claiming the attacks had stopped and that the site's year old backup had been used to recover the site. Because the backup was dated, the website was now under construction. Internet blog Geenstijl purportedly discovered BREIN's server was still fully operational and there had been no attack whatsoever -

1368-491: The support of the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security , in which all the participating operators agreed to block a website if one of them received a blocking order against it. BREIN was charged with updating the domain lists of blocked websites, while the ISPs agreed to bear technical costs of enforcing the blocks. By November 2021 Google voluntarily complied with enforcing the block against TPB, an action that

1406-673: Was reported to be unprecedented on its part. BREIN claimed that Google found itself in "the same situation" as the Dutch ISPs who had signed the recent covenant. BREIN subsequently reported further collaboration with Google entailing removing blocked domains from local search results. In March 2024, BREIN obtained a court order from the Rotterdam District Court for a Dutch ISP to block the Library Genesis and Anna's Archive shadow libraries , thus expanding

1444-577: Was using a laptop confiscated from a "pirate" and given to him by someone involved with the case. BREIN attracted controversy again when several suspicious aspects of their lawsuit against The Pirate Bay and Reservella were revealed, including evidence that documents used to link Fredrik Neij of The Pirate Bay to Reservella were faked. Peter Sunde and the Dutch Pirate Party filed criminal felony charges against both Tim Kuik and BREIN for fraud and forgery. In January 2011, BREIN targeted one of

#4995