<story><title>U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-court-orders-libgen-to-pay-30m-to-publishers-issues-broad-injunction-240925/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pradn</author><text>The critical thing here is that regular people can help. The archive is already split into many O(GB)-sized chunks. We need to ensure each chunk has many, many copies.&lt;p&gt;Torrents are a widely-understood, robust way to mirror large files. But there&amp;#x27;s no &amp;quot;meta-coordination&amp;quot; built in to the protocol. It&amp;#x27;s not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks. The optimization function here is maximal chunk availability, subject to individual storage limits and reliability (ie: how often they&amp;#x27;re online).&lt;p&gt;It should be easy to just press a button to join a shadow library, allocated 100GB, and be part of the mission.&lt;p&gt;The best effort I&amp;#x27;ve seen in this space is some guy running a script that crawls the number of seeders for a list of SciHub torrents. Users manually pick the ones with the lowest seeds. All very cumbersome, and prone to staleness.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is all a technical problem, separate from infringing copyright or whatever. In the same way as torrents being a technical solution for sharing files, in a general way.</text></item><item><author>internetter</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;annas-archive.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;critical-window.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;annas-archive.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;critical-window.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)&lt;p&gt;To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>everforward</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t know if it&amp;#x27;s strictly desirable to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks, because that provides an avenue for bad actors to attack that assignment (e.g. by e.g. claiming to have a block to drive peers away, but never actually serving it).&lt;p&gt;It would be possible to have the swarm behave cooperatively based on heuristics, though.  Your client gets a copy of what peers have what chunks, so it has enough information to make its own decision on what chunks need to be mirrored the most.  A sufficiently clever algorithm would get pretty close to a centralized cooperation server.&lt;p&gt;Iirc, some extant torrent clients have similar features where they download the &amp;quot;hot&amp;quot; chunks first (the chunks with the most leechers, for private tracker ratios).  I suspect the only reason an &amp;quot;archive&amp;#x2F;sparse&amp;quot; variant of that where it only downloads poorly mirroed chunks doesn&amp;#x27;t exist is because it&amp;#x27;s useless for the normal &amp;quot;download a file&amp;quot; use case.  Sparse chunks of a file are basically useless outside of archival.</text></comment>
<story><title>U.S. court orders LibGen to pay $30M to publishers, issues broad injunction</title><url>https://torrentfreak.com/u-s-court-orders-libgen-to-pay-30m-to-publishers-issues-broad-injunction-240925/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pradn</author><text>The critical thing here is that regular people can help. The archive is already split into many O(GB)-sized chunks. We need to ensure each chunk has many, many copies.&lt;p&gt;Torrents are a widely-understood, robust way to mirror large files. But there&amp;#x27;s no &amp;quot;meta-coordination&amp;quot; built in to the protocol. It&amp;#x27;s not possible, using just torrents, to have the swarm cooperatively assign who stores which chunks. The optimization function here is maximal chunk availability, subject to individual storage limits and reliability (ie: how often they&amp;#x27;re online).&lt;p&gt;It should be easy to just press a button to join a shadow library, allocated 100GB, and be part of the mission.&lt;p&gt;The best effort I&amp;#x27;ve seen in this space is some guy running a script that crawls the number of seeders for a list of SciHub torrents. Users manually pick the ones with the lowest seeds. All very cumbersome, and prone to staleness.&lt;p&gt;Of course, this is all a technical problem, separate from infringing copyright or whatever. In the same way as torrents being a technical solution for sharing files, in a general way.</text></item><item><author>internetter</author><text>&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;annas-archive.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;critical-window.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;annas-archive.org&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;critical-window.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Years of this whack-a-mole, yet no clear use case found for banning shadow libraries. Books are highly information dense, making them an ideal target for archival. Shadow libraries are unique in their ability to search over all knowledge known to man, something that publishers refuse. They democratize access, resist censorship (some of which is happening in the land of the free), and provide better chance at preservation. There’s not even much evidence that shadow libraries detract from authors, who are already robbed by publishers (and most of the publisher’s funding comes from institutions, not individuals)&lt;p&gt;To hell with it. Viva la revolución. Let knowledge be free.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bhaney</author><text>&amp;gt; regular people can help&lt;p&gt;Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understanding is that if I seed these torrents I&amp;#x27;m going to get spammed with DMCA letters from publishers until my ISP gives up and cuts my service. If we need to seed exclusively through tor or VPNs in copyright-notice-ignoring countries, then that&amp;#x27;s not all that accessible to &amp;quot;regular people&amp;quot; anymore.</text></comment>