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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

LibGen is the most important achievement of humanity. It is much more important to keep it going than the most of sovereign countries.

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A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations, ought to create and maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.

But how should people be incentivized to create new stuff if the old one isn't being hidden away from the public's eyes. /s

How would this differ from a system of public libraries, which most advanced countries have?

Because it offers the content to everyone anywhere for free without authentication or a limit on the number of concurrent copies available.

Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know, but it is certainly a different point on the continuum than traditional libraries.

> Is this a good tradeoff between protecting IP to incentivize creation through monetization and the various societal goods of making it widely available? I don't know

The actual current status-quo is. Despite the most of the worthy books being available on pirate websites, people still buy books. Publishers still are not bankrupt. Even independent individuals post "I wrote a book" here every now and then, link to DRM-free purchase pages and seem happy.

I personally spent many hundreds dollars buying DRM-free ebooks on GumRoad and HumbleBundle (despite most of them being on LibGen!). I also bought numerous hardcover paper books after reading their pirated ebook versions.

> maintain something like LibGen as a national common good.

Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection of printed literature on STEM topics, the books have published not for the sake of earning money, also they used to have free libraries among all the villages. This is the closest example I can give and BTW those Russian books are freely published on Russian torrent trackers.

> A proper sovereign country, not dominated by totalitarian corporations

Even without any further clarification the search among existing countries is going to return 0 results.

Also free psychiatric hospitals where dissidents would be confined with "sluggish schizophrenia" and dosed heavily with psychoactive drugs.

Psy* (psychology, psychiatry etc) is neither a science nor a medicine. If your only issue with Soviet regiment is intential usage of psy* pseudoscience then try to search about the Rosenhan experiment.

There is neuroscience though which is a science and can prove things like depression and schizophrenia exist (many distinct kinds of both, possible to distinguish using MRI). Sadly there aren't many neuroscientists and MRI machines available to general public so we still have to rely on psychiatrists for help when our neural system goes awry. In many cases they actually help.

> Soviet Russia used to have amazing collection

Meanwhile they still have flibusta.is where almost any book ever published in Russian can be downloaded one-click as structured XML (FB2) and the maintainer is dying of brain cancer right now after having paid for the server to run for some more weeks. Russian is among the top languages in terms of the amount of books published in it. Apparently we are witnessing two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time.

Hurry up with downloading these from the website because the Flibusta author has reported on having glioblastoma few days ago, and there is no new leader for the project. The servers are going to be shut down and the good name is going to be spotless because of not reused. Probably this is why you told about "two great libraries of humanity dying at the same time". BTW all 450Gb of Flibusta can be downloaded via torrents but I don't know how to download all of Libgen.

> I don't know how to download all of Libgen.

See https://wiki.mhut.org/distribution:torrents

I just hope enough capable people will download everything to be able to create mirrors again someday. Perhaps the darknet can turn out a better place.

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