Although sharing copyrighted materials online without permission may be illegal, many people still defend the practice, especially when it comes to the dissemination of academic knowledge. Library Genesis (or LibGen), sometimes referred to as the “Pirate Bay of Science,” is a search engine kept alive by these defenders, but it’s always under constant threat of being taken down. Now, however, a group of redditors and seedboxers have stepped up to help ensure that LibGen stays online, as well as to coordinate a dedicated effort to archive the enormous wealth of knowledge to which it provides access.
Vice reported on the recent move to save LibGen, which is being coordinated through the r/seedboxes and r/scholar subreddits. Reddit user u/shrine seems to be doing most of the coordination at this time, asking fellow redditors and seedbox providers to step up and make available the means for storing and sharing all of the information that can be found using LibGen. The library of content that can be accessed via LibGen is monstrous however—there is 33 terabytes of data, including 2.4 million books covering topics like science, engineering, and medicine—so the amount of online storage space the project will require is equally massive.
LibGen was first established by Russian scientists in 2008 as an effort to keep access to the knowledge provided by its predecessor, library.nu—a similar site that morphed into ebooksclub.org and then gigapedia between 2004 and 2010. While LibGen, a site accessible for those willing to dig a little, was originally online concurrently with library.nu, the latter was shut down in 2012 due to a court order, leaving LibGen as an extant provider of free access to copyrighted academic knowledge. Sci-Hub, which is more or less a similar attempt to give people free access to copyrighted materials, is also still up and running, although the LibGen wiki does note that “LibGen does not share the same goals and philosophy as Sci-Hub.”
In terms of how this latest effort to keep LibGen alive is being implemented, that’s a matter of providing enough seedboxes for the site’s torrent files. LibGen, like Pirate Bay, is able to give access to copyrighted materials by keeping them stored in separated bits on computers and servers across the globe. When a person wants to access, say, a particular scientific paper off of LibGen, a torrent, which is kind of like an index, looks up where all the bits of data that make up the scientific paper are stored. The torrent then gives the computer belonging to the person seeking access the metadata needed to find all of said bits. However, the torrent files require a lot of storage space. This is where the seedboxes come in.
https://t.co/XT2qFXLcWV and Ultraseedbox have pledged 10+ TB towards seeding libgen (and hopefully @Sci_Hub) torrents https://t.co/cGm8OCbq1N
— Bryan Bishop (@kanzure) December 1, 2019
Essentially, seedboxes are remote, high-bandwidth servers that are used to upload and download data. In order to save LibGen, u/shrine put out a clarion call of sorts on Reddit, asking for people to provide seedboxes for the torrent files required to keep LibGen up and running. In response, two seedbox services, Seedbox.io and UltraSeedbox, stepped up, and pledged nine and eight terabytes respectively. And while this is obviously not enough seedbox space for LibGen’s 33 terabytes of torrents, u/shrine and other redditors were ecstatic with the response. For reference, u/shrine said that as of December 2, Seedbox.io was serving 1.6 terabytes of the torrent files, which equates to about 100,000 books. (It should also be noted that other redditors stepped up with their own seedboxes.)
But because using seedboxes to continuously serve up 33 terabytes of torrents for LibGen’s users is untenable, u/shrine and others are also calling on internet archivists to permanently store all of the data. One such online archive, The-Eye (run by a user who goes by the name of -Archivist), has apparently teamed up with LibGen’s defenders in order to help make this permanent storage a reality, which isn’t that far fetched. As Vice notes, The-Eye has already archived terabytes of data, “which include conspiracy theory documents, old software, video game roms, books, and a lot more.”
A video from Dediseedbox describing how seedboxes work.
Regardless of what happens with this attempt to keep LibGen up and running, the most important question here concerns the morality of this type of open access. What LibGen is doing is certainly illegal—in fact, in 2015, the District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LibGen to shut down and suspend its domain name—but that doesn’t mean it necessarily should be. As u/shrine notes in one of his Reddit posts, LibGen is “the largest free library in the world, servicing tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals around the world who live in developing countries that can’t afford to buy books and scientific journals… [and there’s] almost nothing else like this on Earth.”
What do you think of LibGen and its providing free and open access to copyrighted materials? Do you think these redditors and seedbox services are moral crusaders, or can you not get past the fact that what they’re doing is illegal? Seed your opinions in the comments!
Feature image: Kristina Alexanderson
