FBI and Austria's C4 Hit Z-Library with a New Wave of Domain Seizures
torrentfreak.comThere’s many laws not worth their enforcement costs.
These seizures are some of the only legal actions which are just emblematic of pure corruption. The government serving the interests of middlemen whose primary impact on science is making it less accessible and charging rents on it. It’s a hellish parody of copyright law.
If I worked for Elsevier I’d feel worse about what I did for a living than if I worked for Marlboro.
Why spend so much effort taking down societally good sites rather than taking down real criminals?
Easy to execute and has no risks, all for the same salary. So the system gives no incentive to take down real criminals
Because law enforcement has always existed to serve and protect corporate interests. I'm old and not trying to be edgy. It's just so. The things they do that seem like protecting people are only doing so to maintain order but ultimately everything they actually do is in the name of maintaining private profit.
Regular folk can’t afford that level of policing.
Argentina already 'home confined' two Russians who are battling extradition to the US to face charges.
https://torrentfreak.com/home-confined-z-library-defendants-...
At some point in the future, people will look back at things like this in utter confusion - jail-time and a massive waste of police resources in order to stop people from sharing books…
They aren't worried about people sharing books at this point, or at least they shouldn't be. They're worried about people building their own models.
Here's something I'd pay for (probably with some sort of sketchy crypto, sadly): send me a huge-ass hard drive (or array of drives) with a complete mirror of Z-Library, Library Genesis, and sci-hub on it.
That will be a very reasonable thing to expect in a few years. Based on the rate of advancement of memory density and LLM tech I wrote this [0] a while back.
Containment of "the human corpus" (all significant written works since antiquity) is a lost cause for the authorities. Stunts like this Australian thing are symbolic rituals by the dying publishing industry against a downhill battle.
For a brief window you'll have Fahrenheit 451 style police trying to enforce physical warrants and seizure of "illegal reading materials", but proliferation, diminishing size, sheer utility and cost of enforcement will soon make the whole misadventure water under the bridge.
Yeah, we will look back at early 21st century as a sorry bloody episode to be embarrassed by.
[0] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio...
> Stunts like this Australian thing
You mean OP's Austrian thing? Or something else? Australia's the one with the kangaroos and Austria the one with famous painters.
> Austria the one with famous painters
As an Austrian, I hope you are talking about Klimt and Schiele.
:) I'm afraid that very funny comment might be lost on a few people. Forgive me for being so crude [0].
Just go on Anna's Archive, happy downloading
Not practical, and not safe (as this very article illustrates).
Isn't anyone capable of building their own models technically sophisticated enough to get around basically any normal anti-piracy measure? Or for that matter has already downloaded all the books?
Eventually, someone is going to figure out how to train these things in a distributed fashion. When that happens, the more people who own as much data as possible, the better.
problem is keeping up with the volume of new books/articles coming out daily.
If you're an author whose livelihood depends on sales, would you still call it sharing?
Yes. Many do. Dig deeper and it is often the publishers rather than creators pushing such bans. Authors want sales, but in such a competative industry the increased publicity from illegal sharing can be worth more than hypothetical lost sales. Publishers have different motivations as they manage catalogs rather than individual books.
Hopefully in the future we begin to understand that this way of supporting authors severely limits progress in our society due to our inability to share books as widely as possible.
It's wild how much law enforcement just works for corporate interests.
It makes a lot more sense when you realize that the machinery of the state (including especially law enforcement) exists solely to preserve and maintain the existing socioeconomic order and not to, you know, enforce laws or protect the public.
The system is working as designed. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. It’s everywhere.
I'd rather have someone maintain existing socioeconomic order than a total breakdown like, e.g. Haiti where random gangs control the city.
False choice. There are other and better options than these two.
Also if you were on the very bottom of the socioeconomic order, maintaining it would take on a different meaning.
safest place for that is in a communist state, where crime is a monopoly of the Party.
The legal and political system exists to defend property of the wealthy, not liberty.
The fact that the seizures happened on the "1 year anniversary" makes it particularly macabre.
Banning sites that share books. I guess they have already addressed all the illegal pornography, music, pirated soccer games, terrorism, offshore gambling, harrassment, credit card fraud, antiseminitism, homophobia, body shaming, fake news, doxing, zero day sales, and every other great evil on the internet. It has been a long journey, but now that all those are dealt with, we can now crack down on people wanting to read too many books.
Somewhere at a dinner table. The son who looks upon his father as the victor of the west. He utters that daily question steeped in curiosity:
An you Dad, how did you spend your day in service of our cause?
After a pause, which might be a hint of an amount of independent thinking, but not really.
The father responds: I protected America by preventing poor people from reading enough books!
What a world we live in. Can't wait to see what's next.
> antiseminitism, homophobia, body shaming, fake news, doxing
Careful now. Literacy is a noble goal, but piracy is still a crime. Once you start taking down sites for things that aren't crimes, everything's fair game.
Considering current events in Israel and the absurd PR war on social media, it doesn't take much for even a Jew to earn the anti-Semitic achievement right now.
Be very careful about calling piracy a crime. It can be, but only in specific circumstances. Simple copyright violation is not generally criminal. It normally has to rise to the level of financial gain in order to trigger actual criminal laws. In this case, it is the wire fraud and money laundering charges that doom them.
So much for Austria's so called "neutrality".
How is the promise to never again participate in warfare compromised? Clearly participating in international criminal investigations is not a military act.
Nitpick: never is a strong word to use, the neutrality can be revoked by an act of parliment. See https://www.parlament.gv.at/fachinfos/rlw/Was-macht-die-oest...
Austria might be neutral on warfare and multi-national defense agreement (not a member of NATO) but I think that's a separate issue from copyright law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Neutrality
They may not be nato, but australia is part of the five eyes and the new submarine tech deal. Australia is very big on multi-national defense.
Austria != Australia
If it was actually about Australia, it'd be wholly and totally unsurprising - we don't defend our citizens. Ever.
Lol. Ive been awake too long.
That was Switzerland
Austria is also a neutral country.
Not really. We are part of the EU and are a western country.
Neutrality is just something the Austrians tell themselves to make them "proud" of their country.
Source: Am Austrian.