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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

Anna’s Archive, a mirror (arguably the successor) of Library Genesis and Sci-Hub, is asking for help seeding over 500 TB of book and papers for long-term preservation. Currently, 40% of that are seeded by fewer than 4 nodes.

Note: This is 30M+ books, 100M+ papers. Depending on your philosophy and jurisdiction, you might be stealing a few billion $. Or not.

> By seeding these torrents, you help preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture. These torrents represent the vast majority of human knowledge that can be mirrored in bulk.

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Is LibGen & Sci-Hub at risk of coming down? I know it's a game of cat and mouse, but I was just under the assumption that they were both doing fine relatively speaking. And what makes Anna's Archive better/different?

Disclaimer: not an expert in any of this, just stumbled across that page on Anna's Archive.

Sci-Hub is down (as in, you can't search/view/download papers from sci-hub.se), AFAIK.

Anna's Archive aggregates into a unified database material from Libgen.rs, Sci-Hub, Libgen.li, Z-Library, Internet Archive Controlled Digital Lending, and DuXiu 读秀. (See: https://annas-archive.org/datasets )

The .se domain was seized in Jan 2023:

<https://torrentfreak.com/domain-registry-takes-sci-hubs-se-d...>

If nothing else, investment diversification.

Z-Library was significantly attacked recently. There was a huge takedown in 2022, and I'm finding reports as of March 2024 as well:

2024: "FBI Carries Out Fresh Round of Z-Library Domain Name Seizures" <https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-carries-out-fresh-round-of-z-li...>

2022: "Z-Library operators arrested, charged with criminal copyright infringement" <https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/18/zlibrary_operators_ar...>

The Z-Library arrests were of Russian nationals, but were arrested in Argentina.

The first Torrentfreak article mentions two other actions in Spring and November 2023.

Sci-Hub has played cat-and-mouse with domains for years, and AFAIU has still withheld posting new scientific articles given pending litigation/prosecution in India.

Another Torrentfreak article from Nov 2023 gives an update on numerous issues with text liberation sites, including Anna's Archive, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library. At the time, the Anna's Archive twitter account had been "wiped out", so much for that platform's "free speech" stance.

<https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-piracy-news-brief-1-extra...>

What are the most favorable jurisdictions to run seeding out of, mitigating risk of copyright related reporting and account closure (assuming virtual compute)?

Russia

Ukraine, Russia, Moldova, Romania, Vietnam, Africa. Often anywhere near those too

Turkey?

I think Turkey would be fine but I don't know or have anything to base it off of

How about favorable places given an anonymous virtual credit card that you bought on a spamming-services forum? (As in, if you don't have to worry about being identified, and it's just a question of wanting the seedbox itself to be unlikely to get taken down)

A lot of english-advertising hosts from the regions in my comment are going to advertise DMCA-ignore, freedom of speech, and/or privacy. And you basically can't go wrong with any of them. Seedbox-as-a-service providers specifically are going to be generally be fine too although many of those are hosted in Netherlands which is slowly becoming less copyright-infringement -friendly.

One specific host I'll mention is vsys.host (UA) (which anna's archive uses too) but they're not going to be the cheapest option.

Probably Sweden.

Edit: I knew Sweden is a piracy hub but I was under the wrong impression regarding how Sweden legally sees piracy. Yes this is where TPB was raided, but also this is where TPB launched, and there seems to be a certain ideology in Sweden that propels sites like TPB. Either way, please stay safe online.

Isn't that where The Pirate Bay folks were prosecuted?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirate_Bay_trial

Absolutely not for anything large scale like this.

> By seeding these torrents, you help preserve humanity’s knowledge and culture. These torrents represent the vast majority of human knowledge that can be mirrored in bulk.

I am having a hard time reading that claim as anything other than a bad-faith justification. Torrent nodes are not at all a good way to "preserve humanity's knowledge and culture".

EDIT: I'm no longer convinced I'm correct.

Can you elaborate on why you believe it’s in bad faith.

I only quoted a small bit from their website. Immediately below the quoted bit is this explanation:

> These torrents are not meant for downloading individual books. They are meant for long-term preservation. With these torrents you can set up a full mirror of Anna’s Archive, using our source code and metadata (which can be generated or downloaded as ElasticSearch and MariaDB databases).

I'm not an expert in any of this, but it doesn't strike me as a bad-faith justification of anything.

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