alt Hacker NewsI used libgen quite a lot; new books were hard to find there, but many old books were available. Then libgen was kind of eliminated by the mega-corporation alliance. The latter is very hypocritical - see Meta and others sniffing off data to train for AI.
Anna's Archive kind of semi-replaced libgen (a few libgen mirrors are sometimes back up but then disappear again) but for various reasons I don't quite like Anna's Archive as much; the UI is imo also more confusing.
Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive. Personally I don't use or "need" music; if I need a good song I use yt-dlp on youtube and get it these days. Many years ago napster. But this has also stopped, sort of; I rarely get new songs, mostly because they are often really just ... bad. Or, I don't need them locally anyway as I could listen to them in the background on youtube (which kind of makes you wonder why the mega-corporations really fight freedom providers such as Anna's Archive; and before that the noble pirates from piratebay and so forth).
So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion:
"Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg."
To me this is blatant dictatorship and censorship. I really do not want these private de-facto entities disguised as "public courts" to restrict any of us here. I want to decide the information I can access, at all times, without restriction. So that they can abuse people in, say, the USA and deny them easy access to these useful resources, is criminal behaviour by such corporation courts. We need to change this globally - and I believe it will eventually happen. Right now this may still be a minority opinion, but keep in mind that years ago, the right to repair movement was framed by corporations as evil. More recently they are even winning in court cases, see the most recent John Deere case and requirement to open up access when people purchased hardware.
Eventually I think freedom to information will win. Good luck to Anna's Archive and others.
Replies
> Now the mega-corporations decided to kill off Anna's Archive.
You can still torrent the books from library genesis if they succeed. It would be a bit of an effort, but free books are currently the only positive thing (for me) in the internet.
Yes and: Our current intellectual property regime is indefensible.
Yes and: Gatekeeping megacorp's profits continue to rise, while creators are screwed.
The original intent of copyright protection in the USA was to encourage production of culture. (Ditto patents for knowledge.) That sounds fantastic. I support that.
> So I think the following is IMO by far the biggest problem, no matter one's personal opinion: > > "Rakoff entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg."
Legally speaking, the Southern District of New York can say whatever it likes, and Libera, Sweden, India, St-Pierre-et-Miquelon, Greenland, Switzerland, Pakistan, Grenada, and the British Virgin Islands are free to ignore what the US says. They all have national sovereignty over their respective ccTLDs, and of them, most are not going to simply accept the US telling them what to do considering recent geopolitical missteps.