Hacker News Reader

While the founders may have their origins in the Soviet Union (and not Russian), I don’t think the site has anything todo with the Russian government. Rather, it’s the reaction of some individuals to the difficult and expensive access to literature in the west.

As a Russian, I agree in the part that it seems extremely unlikely our government would even think about doing something like this. (Wikipedia says it started explicitly in 1990’s RuNet though, which I am inclined to believe.)

The Russian government is not inclined to prosecute Russian companies for breaking western laws which kind of aids this sort of thing, even if that wasn't their intention.

Why would any government punish state company for violating law in some country on other side of the planet?

Good luck prosecuting the US company somewhere in say Philippines...

Most do cooperate on things like copyright law. Not so much enforcing the foreign law as legislating a similar thing domestically.

A further issue that’s often overlooked in English-language discussion is Russian-language books.

A lot of specialist scientific literature such as monographs only saw a single run of 300, 1000, or at best 3000 copies in the Soviet Union, and that’s it. If you’d missed it and didn’t have access to one of a handful of libraries that had it, tough luck. (To give an idea of what counts as specialist, the foremost textbook on general relativity, Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, was translated into Russian in 1977 and had a single 3000-copy print run. The 1973 English original is still in print.)

Furthermore, when the Soviet Union fell, so for the most part did the publishing houses, and nobody knows where the offset printing films for the books went. So nobody can print Soviet books again without typesetting them from scratch, even those that weren’t rare. (Did you know that the new Russian edition of Gradshtein and Ryzhik’s special functions manual is technically a translation from Russian to English to Russian? Or so it says on the copyright page, anyway.)

In that environment, having widely available scans of books was absolutely vital; for those who teach students fresh out of high school who don’t necessarily know enough English, it still is. Today’s LibGen arose as an amalgamation of a number of those efforts from the early days of the Russian-speaking Internet.

One was maintained (unofficially) by people from the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of the Moscow State University. Another was mirrored (unofficially) by a Moscow-based particle physics institute that until several years ago originated a large part of the Russian presence at CERN. I’m sure other Russian-speaking research centers contributed just as much or more, I’m just not familliar with that part of the history.

As Russian-language scientific publishing stagnated, and subscriptions to English-language literature by and large did not materialize (what with them costing most of a typical money-starved institute’s budget), obtaining scanned and ebook versions of English-language literature from Western acquaintances became more important. People gradually unified under LibGen’s banner, and here we are.

And yes, none of this ever got government support, as far as I know.

Yes this has been a misdirection from the publishers for a while that even some librarians are repeating (other things are supposedly stolen credentials used to do more than just getting access to publications).

Russian government not caring about enforcing western corporation's copyright does play a big role.

I wonder how successful Russian companies are at enforcing their IP in the US? I’ll venture a guess that the US is not helpful either.

I think you’re overstating how much anyone knows or cares that Libgen is Russian (if that is a correct categorization). Also, as you imply, the hurt to publishers may be overstated - a download is not a lost sale.

> a download is not a lost sale

It very much is. Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.

> It very much is. Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.

An ancedote is not the same as data.

(Legal) libraries had an effect of increasing sales, much to the surprise of everyone when they were first introduced. Its entirely possible that piracy could have too. Or maybe it doesn't. Who knows. I think the effects are non-obvious enough that actual studies are needed to know what the actual affect is.

Hm... Once in a while, I buy things that I previously downloaded.

Not specialized scientific literature, I will never contribute to Springer's bottom line. But many books and films.

Sharing is marketing. Microsoft executed this beautifully under Gates, this is the reason №1 they are so dominant now.

Reviling sharing by relabelling it as pirating while still profiting from it on a different level is a good old strategy.

I, on the other hand, have never purchased anything I was going to pirate if I couldn't find it. So for me it definitely is not correlated. If I couldn't find it I just moved on. I tend to pirate nice to haves.

Everybody's different. For me, an inverse correlation happens: libgen etc. act as a bookshop where I can freely browse and evaluate stuff before I buy. So I want to make sure I'm not cheated.

Sometimes the brand is enough, i.e. I know by experience that if a book is from Manning I can trust it, whereas if it's from Packt it's hit-or-miss-but-probably-miss. Self-published ones? 90% are worthless, 1% are gems with the rest on the verge. You can't really know this from reading a sample chapter or the ToC.

> I've made several purchases for things that I tried to pirate and couldn't find.

What if you don’t have the money for the purchase? You’d never buy the thing if you couldn’t get it for free.

But at the same time, I think you can definitely say that it’s often like a lost sale.

Not sure how you missed this from my previous comment, but here it is again

> Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated

>>> a download is not a lost sale

>> It very much is. => FALSE (my opinion)

>> Not 1:1, but it's absolutely correlated. => TRUE (my opinion)

> I think you can definitely say that it’s often like a lost sale. => TRUE (my opinion)

Sorry for being a nuisance and getting caught up in semantics. I think we're mostly in agreement, my bad.

Yeah no if the thing I want is 100 dollars and takes 2 weeks to ship I'll pass.

My wife would not be able to do her PhD without LibGen

People don’t understand how hard and expensive it is to legitimately access research articles if you’re from a developing poor country

Can she not get any inter library loan?

I don't think it was a strategic move any more than scihub (also originating in Russia) was

Also, IRC channels with many thousands of textbooks have been around for decades (and have nothing to do with Russia)

people overestimate the capabilities of the corrupt russian government to an absurd degree. Piracy is rampant in russia because it s not suppressed there. VK is full of all the movies you can think of.

> It was a no brainer for them from a strategic point of view:

Why elevate what is likely the work of a few committed private individuals to the level of some strategic state conspiracy?

My thoughts exactly; I recall stumbling across libgen back in 2018 - it even had a user forum; back then it was clearly just a one-person operation. I got the impression it was someone who liked collecting, organising and sharing PDFs that interested them. And then with time it, the site blew up in popularity.

Occam's razor is strong here

PDFs also have a scripting language built in, right? Could that be a good attack vector?

It seems like a pretty good site to attack people from, for social reasons. It sits at a nice confluence of: technically unauthorized copying, but feels like not such a big deal. And getting academic papers can be a PITA. And the audience is probably self-selecting for folks who are doing interesting STEM stuff.

Surely at this point your average pdf viewer is sandboxed to hell and back? (Eg your browser).

If I wanted to run JS in someone’s browser I don’t need a pdf to do it.

I guess I’m thinking of somebody like myself, like I’ve known forever the prudent thing to do is disable JavaScript on my browser wherever possible. But I didn’t know PDFs had a built in scripting language until a couple years ago, I mostly use PDF for papers, where this isn’t as relevant.

In principle, any piece of software can have zero-days in it. PDF readers included.

Scripting languages can help with certain exploits, but arent vulnerabilities in and of themselves.

Anyhow, theoretically possible but also kind of unlikely. Such attacks usually have a shortish shelf life so are used in more targeted fashion to prolong the exploits life and get the most value from it.

Libgen is Russian?

More like post-Soviet. Regardless of the country of operation (which included e.g. Ecuador at some point, in which the owner of lib.rus.ec, the predecessor of libgen, moved), all these shadow libraries and knowledge preservation attempts represent consistent political action by the individuals with views formed by samizdat and the Soviet/post-crash reading culture. That includes Sci-Hub, Libgen, and those most never heard about but which were extremely influential, like the SU.BOOKS BBS or lib.ru.

Actually not sure about LibGen in its current manifestation, but the wikipedia page clearly traces its origin and earlier iterations to Russia

I don't think there's any evidence of that, it's just supposition based on them being unable to locate them.

There is a lot of evidence that it was originally made by someone Russian-speaking, starting from the fact that initial LibGen collection was some Russian and English literature taken from a Russian torrent-tracker. However I'm sure there was "no strategic point of view" whatsoever, just a pet project by some kind-hearted people.

You can read some other research here - https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/2603....

(And I also have some very brief "scene" knowledge from circa 2010-2012, which confirms the fact, but you'll have to trust my word for it.)

Is there a difference betwixt treating supposition as implicit fact and deliberate misinformation?

Intent is easier to falsify than impact, generally.

American's still very much buy into the super-villain complex regarding Russia drilled into them over the decades.

Yes, Putin does all kind of shit, but this ... please, the national security interest card from copyright holders has been an evergreen.

I love that this perspective completely misses the point in the light of GenAI, the greatest appropriation of all human creation by large american tech companies, destroying untold commercialisation.

Can't have one discusson without the other.

Sounds like how Temu is killing dollar stores and mom and pop e-commerce stores here in the states

The majority of these "mom and pop e-commerce stores here in the states" are dropshipping enterprises that deserve to die.