Pirate library operator arrested, study canceled for 330k members
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
If purchasing isn't ownership, then piracy shouldn't be theft.
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.
We are fucked.
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?
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..
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.
Maximising storage isn't the purpose of this setup, much denser configurations are possible as others have commented.
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-...
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.
I don't think you need 650TB!
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.
Kioxia LC9 SSD Hits 245.76TB of Capacity in a Single Drive - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44643038 (22 days ago, 7 comments)
-> https://www.servethehome.com/kioxia-lc9-ssd-hits-245-76tb-of...
SanDisk's "reply": Sandisk unveils 256 TB SSD for AI workloads, shipping in 2026 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44823148 (10 days ago, no discussion)
-> https://blocksandfiles.com/2025/08/05/sandisk-pre-announces-...
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).
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.
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)
Textbooks are not that distant from academic publishing in terms of the rent seeking that goes on. Textbook publishers essentially bribe academia for the right to rip off their students by providing courses with testing and academic services that are tied to a license in a new textbook that the student is required to buy.
There's further extremes still: sharing a game made by a solo-developer who's only compensation comes from sales is less ethical than sharing a game made by a team who were paid a salary while they worked.
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.
No other contractual terms. The author only sets the price publishers pay and that price is the same for every publisher. Authors can sell directly to the public but still can't impose any additional license terms nor sell for a lower price than the one publishers pay. Individual members of the public can also make copies on their own as long as they pay the fee.
Then any publisher that wants to publish the work simply does so and pays the author the author's fee, which the author can only change once a year and only change uniformly for all publishers.
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"?
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.
Do they? When the required reading is this years's version of the course professor's book, you are drowning in the BS.
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 “.
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.
It's not hypocritical to want a different set of rules for companies.
That is sort of the problem we find ourselves in.
You can apply that logic to large swathe of well paid jobs.
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.
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.
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
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.