Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-library-operator-arrested-study-canceled-for-330k-members-250814/

by speckx • 11 months ago

108 61 11 months ago

ronsor• 11 months ago

Copyright Crime Special Unit

It's amazing that people have somehow been convinced that it's sane not only to throw others in prison for copying files but also to have special police for it.

amarcheschi• 11 months ago

Unless big tech does it I guess

gosub100• 11 months ago

"It's not copyright infringement! I'm just using it to train my neural networks with the information!"

komali22• 11 months ago

That's easy: government should serve the needs of people, not companies.

It's not hypocritical to want a different set of rules for companies.

kelnos• 11 months ago

I had the same thought. Those people could be put to so much better use, solving real problems that everyday people have.

lostlogin2• 11 months ago

Those people could be put to so much better use, solving real problems that everyday people have.

You can apply that logic to large swathe of well paid jobs.

whycome• 11 months ago

Drug and Copyright Enforcement Agency?

I always thought that one reason to go after marijuana was that it was something that one could easily "grow at home" -- eg, make a copy. Alcohol and hard drugs typically required a lot of equipment or expertise.

..and in a dystopian future there will be an agency to remove any unauthorized knowledge (gained from pirated sources) from ones' brain.

trhway• 11 months ago

..and in a dystopian future there will be an agency to remove any unauthorized knowledge (gained from pirated sources) from ones' brain.

as a preview - the similar is going to happen to the LLMs soon. Actually with growth of LLMs it may become unimportant what is in the actual biological brain of its user.

charlieyu1• 11 months ago

You would think we as a society should crack down harder on theft and robbery but here we are subsiding the rich on copyright laws

lisbbb• 11 months ago

The cyberpunk dystopia that 80s fiction authors prepared [some of] us for.

autoexec• 11 months ago

They've been getting away with it for ages. The RIAA even hired a bunch of ex-cops to act as goons, impersonate the FBI, and go on raids

https://web.archive.org/web/20040209170528/http://www.laweek...

I swear I've seen photos of them in their RIAA jackets too, but I can't seem to find any at the moment

wrp2• 11 months ago

In South Korea, educational inequality due to inability to afford educational materials has been an issue for many years.

The argument against piracy is that people have the right to be compensated for their work. Consider this argument in the context of medical services. The extreme pirate position is equivalent to expecting doctors to provide cosmetic surgery for free. The extreme industry position is equivalent to saying doctors should let patients die on the sidewalk if they can't pay.

I'm torn on the issue of sharing files, because I've watched its rise over the past 25 years and seen how tremendously it has improved educational opportunities for poorer peoples.

tux3• 11 months ago

It is important to note that authors are not compensated when you buy access to an academic article in a journal.

In fact, since the authors both do the work of creating the content and peer-reviewing submissions, they must also pay the journal in exchange for doing this work.

Think of it like the patient paying the hospital, the doctor paying the hospital, and in exchange the doctor can do their work at a prestigious hospital, which is all very lucrative (for the hospital)

wrp2• 11 months ago

Journal articles represent an extreme where sharing is most ethical. An opposite extreme would be something like AAA games. In the range between are things like monographs, textbooks, literature, etc.

anramon• 11 months ago

The extreme pirate position is equivalent to expecting doctors to provide cosmetic surgery for free

This analogy is not even remotely applyable to piracy. Piracy is about content that can be shared, you can't grab a surgery and share it with someone else after buying it.

apopapo• 11 months ago

It's not even about "piracy". It's about "unauthorized copying".

Mikhail_Edoshin• 11 months ago

The problem with copyright is that gives the owner too many other rights that can be summed up as a right to also prevent distribution. This creates an imbalance. The owner should only be given the right to be compensated; but other rights should be stripped. For example, why not to require the right to publish a book to always be a public offer that any publisher can join on the same terms?

HPsquared• 11 months ago

How should such a publisher set the price?

exe34• 11 months ago

would you say the cost of copying a pdf file is similar to the cost of several hours in a surgical theatre?

atom_arranger• 11 months ago

The anti piracy stance would be making it illegal for a surgeon/person to copy the procedure another surgeon invented without payment. Copying does not require additional labor from the inventor.

Obviously we would like the inventor of the procedure to be compensated, but is it worth depriving other people, or potentially them dying, to protect "intellectual property"?

squigz3• 11 months ago

Access to education and information should be free - or at the very least a lot less broken than it is today.

https://annas-archive.org/torrents

cyberpunk• 11 months ago

I really would love to help out, but I don't have 650TB of storage laying around :(

The logistics of this archive are quite crazy; most 2-4U JBODs I worked with hold like 24 or 45 SFF SAS disks.

Standard size (unless things have changed) for 10k sff sas disks seems to be about 1.2TB, so you'd need 544 of these to build a raidz big enough. So we're talking 12 4U jbods, well over a full rack.

I guess I can just hope some rich techie with a volcano lair / private datacenter somewhere is keeping a copy..

squigz3• 11 months ago

Well I don't think you have to dedicate 650TB or nothing :P

A full rack or more sounds like a lot, but I don't know much about hardware, so I'll take your word for it.

0cf8612b2e1e• 11 months ago

Why limit yourself to the SFF?

45 Drives is the company that builds the hard drive pods used by Backblaze and they offer a 4U, 60x3.5 inch drive array. Has an advertised capacity of 1.44 PB, which would be 24TB drives configured without redundancy.

https://www.45drives.com/products/storage-server-storinator-...

Xymist• 11 months ago

Seagate have an Exos M in 36TB for about £450, so 24 of those could do it. Three vdevs with one parity drive each? Call the project £13k?

Not exactly a production grade setup, but it'd do the job and you'll see fewer failures each year than in 544 10k SAS drives.

komali22• 11 months ago

Enter how many TBs you can help seed, and we’ll give you a list of torrents that need the most seeding! The list is somewhat random every time, so two people generating at the same time will still cover different parts of the collection.

I don't think you need 650TB!

sliken• 11 months ago

24TB drives are quite available, $300 on newegg.

Buy a Data60 (60 disk chassis), add 60 drives. Buy a 1U server (2 for redundancy). I'd recommend 5 stripes of 11 drives (55 total) with 5 global spares. Use a RAIDz3 so 8 disks of data per 11 drives.

Total storage should be around 8 * 24 * 5 = 960GB, likely 10% less because of marketing 10^9 bytes instead of 2^30 for drive sizes. Another 10% because ZFS doesn't like to get very full. So something like 777TB usable which easily fits 650TB.

I'd recommend a pair of 2TB NVMe with a high DWPD as a cache.

The disks will cost $18k, the data60 is 4U, and a server to connect it is 1U. If you want more space upgrade to 30TB $550 each) drives or buy another Data60 full of drives.

immibis• 11 months ago

10k sff sas disks

There's your problem. Ordinary consumer LFF SATA disks go up to 30TB-ish now, though that may not be the most cost-effective size (or it may be, when you consider the cost of the drive bays as well).

AlienRobot• 11 months ago

You can make it free by producing a book and then releasing it to public domain.

perelin• 11 months ago

but how was he found out? did telegram cooperate with korean law enforcement?

bestouff• 11 months ago

Telegram forcefully "cooperated" with French law enforcement. Maybe the French police shared intel with Korean

charcircuit• 11 months ago

The Ministry of Culture and Sport says others involved will be tracked down and given lessons in copyright law.

This is way too soft of a punishment. If people can get away with attending a lesson there will not be enough risk in the risk reward analysis people do before violating people's copyrights.

kps• 11 months ago

Wait until you see the price of the textbook.

BriggyDwiggs422• 11 months ago

Won’t someone think of the textbook publishers. They are but paupers.

cmsefton• 11 months ago

And next week, "Meta argues new Law AI tool trained on books from Pirate Library is fair use."

JoeDohn2• 11 months ago

So 'pirating' stuff for personal use is bad, but if it's for corp use and benefits than it's good.

edoceo• 11 months ago

In USA? Correct (unfortunately)

JoeDohn2• 11 months ago

I guess US, but not only. I am eluding to the whole AI thing, instead of using it as a platform to improve human condition and not only profit financially, we do have 'Step mom' and 'Russian girl' bots built on top of 'pirated' content.

We are fucked.

WhyOhWhyQ• 11 months ago

In America, I see the main argument in support of the destruction of norms for AI corporations and copyright theft is as follows. "If we adhere to standard views of copyright, then we will be disadvantaged in the race to super-intelligence against China."

I really think this argument is baseless, however, because there's absolutely no reason to think if Chinese corporations make some paradigm shifting advancement in AI then American corporations won't quickly copy it, just as Chinese corporations VERY quickly caught up to GPT 3. Is less than 1 year of economic advantage really worth the permanent erasure of norms like copyright and privacy?

aussieguy1234• 11 months ago

Obviously book authors need to be paid, but those at the bottom of the ladder seeking to climb it through education can't afford the books.

Perhaps some kind of program run by the publishers could give free books to these people, to reduce the motivation for piracy of the books? Those that can afford it would still pay, of course.

That said, the current system is broken, so while this particular site is gone, z-library and anna's archive live on and won't be getting taken down any time zoon.

lostlogin2• 11 months ago

Obviously book authors need to be paid

Do they? When the required reading is this years's version of the course professor's book, you are drowning in the BS.

neya• 11 months ago

The real issue is modern day purchasing is not ownership. It's not even leasing. It's you pay the full list price for a PDF or music file that can disappear anytime from your library if the corpo-rats decide it shouldn't be available to you anymore.

If purchasing isn't ownership, then piracy shouldn't be theft.

pbronez• 11 months ago

I would like to have a trustworthy, privacy-respecting digital asset licensing service. Ideally free from profit motives, maybe run my a government, maybe a non profit. Regardless, i want my right to engage with a work separated from the manifestation of that work. Movies Anywhere kinda does this, but I want it to go way, way further.

Buy a book? You now own a the right to read that book from whatever file. Subscribe to Disney+? You have the right to watch all the marvel movies. Even when those movies are chopped and re-edited into a massive full chronology.

If a digital store ceases operations, you retain the rights to the bits. Maybe you have to do some work to get access to them, but you’re perfectly within your rights to torrent those bits.

Heck, maybe you could like the rights management to distribution. Have a right to the bits? Please seed.

K0balt• 11 months ago

I think that especially for educational, engineering, and scientific research, these kinds of “libraries” cross over firmly into the public good.

Making money on textbooks by selling them to students at premium prices is despicable and is a poverty of mind for the future. Course tuition should include necessary book access. We gain so much more as a civilisation by sharing within academia that there needs to be a change in the way that the publishing industry treats these kinds of “violations “.

zugi• 11 months ago

I recall attending a talk by Richard Stallman where he critiqued the use of the word "piracy" for file sharing. "Pirates" attack and destroy ships, kill innocents, and generally rape and plunder. How does that word fit what's basically sharing and trying to help your neighbor?

TylerE• 11 months ago

Utterly losing the plot while playing dumb word games is so typical Stallman.

asacrowflies• 11 months ago

Seems dead on in this case.

squigz3• 11 months ago

The words we use to describe and talk about things and people is actually very important and very much helps shape our impressions, so I can't really see how he's lost the plot.

tiahura• 11 months ago

It seems like the passing of linger should get more notice.

move-on-by• 11 months ago

No doubt many LLMs have trained on the same content, with no complaints.

Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members

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