Shadow library
[1][2] Shadow libraries usually contain textual works like academic papers and ebooks, and may include other digital media like software, music, or films.
There was strict state censorship and control of print materials, which gave rise to the dissident activity of copying and disseminating censored or underground works.
Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the official censorship program, these sharing practices continued as a result of widespread economic hardship.
[1]: 26–27 Gigapedia, by then renamed to Library.nu, was shut down in 2012 through a lawsuit from a coalition of seventeen publishing companies including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, and MacMillan.
[2] LibGen's operators have described the site's mission as enabling access to information for poor people and opposing the gating of knowledge by elite academic institutions, with one administrator writing "the target groups for LibGen are poors: Africa, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, China, Russia and post-USSR etc., and on a separate note, people who do not belong to academia.
[8] American activist Aaron Swartz captured the motivations of many shadow libraries in his 2008 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,[1]: 28–29 writing: The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations.
[1]: 25–26 The aggressive legal strategies pursued by Western music and film industries against online filesharing websites during the 2000s were not widely mirrored by academic or literary publishers against shadow libraries.
Library.nu (previously Gigapedia) was shut down in 2012 by a lawsuit from a coalition of seventeen publishing companies including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, and MacMillan.
[1]: 26–27 [5] In 2015, the academic publisher Elsevier sued LibGen and Sci-Hub in American courts, accusing them of "operat[ing] an international network of piracy and copyright infringement".
[15] Elsevier won a default judgment against the two groups, and was awarded $15 million in damages, but has not collected the money as LibGen's operators are unknown and Sci-Hub's are outside the reach of the US legal system.
[16] In November 2022, the FBI seized domains associated with Z-Library and charged two of its operators with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering.
[24] A class action lawsuit filed in June 2023 against ChatGPT developer OpenAI, led by authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, alleged that the company used shadow libraries to source training data for their large language model.
[8] In February 2022, after joining a lawsuit with Amazon Publishing and Penguin Random House against a Ukrainian website selling pirated e-books, American bestselling fiction authors John Grisham and Scott Turow published an op-ed in The Hill calling on US lawmakers to pass a law prohibiting search engines from linking to piracy websites.
