Library Genesis

From HandWiki
Short description: File-sharing website for publications
The Library Genesis Project
The project's homepage
Type of site
Shadow library
Available in
  • English
  • Russian
Website
  • libgen.vg
  • libgen.la
  • libgen.bz
  • libgen.gl
  • libgen.li
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional[notes 1]
Current statusActive
Part of a series on
File sharing
Technologies
Video sharing sites
BitTorrent sites
Academic/scholarly
File sharing networks
P2P clients
Streaming programs
Anonymous file sharing
Development and societal aspects
By country or region
Comparisons

Library Genesis (shortened to LibGen) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere.[1] LibGen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users".[2]

LibGen provides access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect web-portal. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of internet piracy. Others assert that academic publishers unfairly benefit from government-funded research, written by researchers, many of whom are employed by public universities, and that LibGen is helping to disseminate research that should be freely available in the first place.[3]

Outages

Since December 2024, LibGen has been targeted by US based Educational Publishers Pearson Education, alongside being placed on a ban list in Germany at request of multiple unnamed publishers.[4]

This legal action is leading to significant outages across the service.

History

The roots of Library Genesis lie in Russia, where the former Soviet Russia and Soviet Union underground book sharing culture known as samizdat arose to illegally get around the tight censorship.[5] As access to printing in the Soviet Union was strictly controlled and censored, dissident intellectuals would hand-copy and retype illegal manuscripts for secret circulation. This was effectively legalized under Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, though the state monopoly on printed media remained.[6]

The volunteers moved into the Russian computer network ("RuNet") in the 1990s, which became awash with hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated contributions. Librarians became especially active, using borrowed access passwords to download copies of scientific and scholarly articles from Western Internet sources, then uploading them to RuNet.[7]

In the early 21st century, the efforts became coordinated, and integrated into one massive system known as Library Genesis, or LibGen, around 2008.[8][9][10] It subsequently absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to, library.nu, which was shut down by legal action in 2012.[11] By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of library.nu with 1.2 million records.[9] As of 4 February 2024, Library Genesis claimed to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science journal articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.[12]

In 2020, the project was forked under a different domain, "libgen.fun", due to internal conflict within the project.[13] As a result, databases were maintained independently and there were content differences between libgen.fun and other LibGen domains. As of 2025, the content of libgen.fun is no longer available, the domain being seized.[4]

As of August 2024, the project, whose website was experiencing temporary outages and technical errors, appeared to no longer be actively managed and its lead programmer was reported to be "inactive".[14]

In mid-December 2024, as the majority of Library Genesis domains were seized or disabled through legal action from a group of publishers led by Pearson Education, the German consortium Clearingstelle Urheberrecht im Internet (de) (CUII), composed of copyright holder groups and internet service providers, also instituted a country-wide blocking order against Library Genesis at the request of publishers whose names were redacted.[4] The latter action was taken without court authorization; instead, the Federal Network Agency was consulted to clear the net neutrality requirements.[4][15]

Litigation

Elsevier lawsuit (2015)

On June 3, 2015, Library Genesis (along with the creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan) was sued by Elsevier, the academic division of the third-largest publishing group by worldwide revenue in 2014.[16] Elsevier accused it of "operating an international network of piracy and copyright infringement"[17] and granting free access to articles and books. In response, the admins accused Elsevier of gaining most of its profits from publicly funded research which should be freely available to all as they are paid for by taxpayers.[3] Elsevier's lawyers then requested the Public Interest Registry to disable one of the domains covered by the lawsuit without a court order but were refused. On June 18, 2015, the District Court for the Southern District of New York allowed Elsevier to serve notice on the defendants by email. Within days of the court decision (before June 22), the then main "libgen.org" website and several mirrors went offline.[18]

As a result of Elsevier's lawsuit, in late October 2015 the District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LibGen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org),[19] but the site remained accessible through alternative domains.[20][21]

Pearson, McGraw Hill, Macmillan and Cengage lawsuit (2023–2024)

On September 14, 2023, the educational publishers Pearson Education (the then third-largest publisher by global revenue[22][23]), McGraw Hill Education, Macmillan Publishers and Cengage Group initiated a lawsuit for copyright infringement against Library Genesis before the District Court for the Southern District of New York. They claimed that the Library Genesis websites "deprive [them] and their authors of income from their creative works, devalue the textbook market and [their] works, and may cause [them] to cease publishing certain works". They demanded control or deletion of the Library Genesis domains and the seizure of its operators' alleged profits.[24] On March 1, 2024, the publishers requested a default judgment and an injunction compelling the gateway providers IPFS, Pinata Technologies and Cloudflare to deny services to Library Genesis.[25]

On September 26, 2024, a US judge ordered LibGen to pay the publishers US$30 million, though the parties responsible for the site are unknown.[26]

In December 2024, the publishers succeeded in seizing the "library.lol" domain and taking most of the other Library Genesis domains offline.[4]

Hosting country

LibGen is reported to be registered in both Russia and the Netherlands, making the appropriate jurisdiction for legal action unclear.[3][27]

Blocks

Some Libgen URLs are blocked by a number of ISPs in the United Kingdom,[28] but such DNS-based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access.[3] It is also blocked by ISPs in France,[29] Germany,[30] Greece,[31] Italy,[32] Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage),[33] and Russia (in November 2018).[34][35] On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, based on a request by BREIN, a local anti-piracy group.[36]

Alleged Meta AI training

Court documents unsealed in March 2025 suggested that Meta Platforms had used LibGen resources to train its generative language AI models. The documents were part of a class-action lawsuit filed against Meta by the novelists Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden and comedian Sarah Silverman.[37][38]

Usage

Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub, which provides free access to millions of research papers and books, relied on LibGen as storage. Papers requested by users were requested from LibGen and served from there if available, otherwise they were fetched by other means and then stored on LibGen.[39]

In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to better seed and host LibGen's data dumps.[40] The project's spokesperson and coordinator 'shrine' described the effort as a way for a "permanent library card for the world" and reported that the response has been "overwhelmingly positive from everyone".[41] In 2020, the project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of content on Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using IPFS.[42][43]

See also

Explanatory notes

  1. ↑ LibGen can be viewed, downloaded, uploaded without an account, but registration is required to view or read topics within its forum.

References

  1. ↑ Cabanac, Guillaume (April 2015). "Bibliogifts in LibGen? A study of a text-sharing platform driven by biblioleaks and crowdsourcing". Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 67 (4): 874–884. doi:10.1002/asi.23445. http://www.irit.fr/publis/SIG/2015_JASIST_C.pdf. Retrieved 28 November 2015. 
  2. ↑ "About Us". https://libgen.me/about. "The libgen.me links aggregator is a community aiming at collecting and cataloging items descriptions for the most part of scientific, scientific and technical directions, as well as file metadata. In addition to the descriptions, the aggregator contains only links to third-party resources hosted by users. All information posted on the website is collected from publicly available public Internet resources and is intended solely for informational purposes." 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Glance, David (15 June 2015). "Elsevier acts against research article pirate sites and claims irreparable harm". The Conversation (U.S. edition). https://theconversation.com/elsevier-acts-against-research-article-pirate-sites-and-claims-irreparable-harm-43293. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Van der Sar, Ernesto (22 December 2024), Domain Seizures and German ISP Blockade Add to Libgen's Troubles, TorrentFreak, https://torrentfreak.com/domain-seizures-and-german-isp-blockade-add-to-libgens-troubles-241222/ 
  5. ↑ Brown, Elizabeth Nolan (2022). "You Can't Stop Pirate Libraries". Reason. https://reason.com/2022/07/24/you-cant-stop-pirate-libraries/. 
  6. ↑ "Samizdat | Dissident Press, Underground Publishing & Soviet Censorship" (in en). Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/technology/samizdat. 
  7. ↑ Bodó 2014, Abstract.
  8. ↑ Karaganis, Joe; Bodo, Balazs (December 15, 2020). "Russia is building a new Napster — but for academic research". Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/07/13/russia-is-building-a-new-napster-but-for-academic-research/. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Bodó, Balázs (2018-04-27). Library Genesis in Numbers: Mapping the Underground Flow of Knowledge. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262345705. https://books.google.com/books?id=SxdZDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA53. Retrieved 2020-11-01. 
  10. ↑ Joe Karaganis (2018). Shadow Libraries: Access to Knowledge in Global Higher Education. MIT Press. p. 53. ISBN 978-0-262-34570-5. https://books.google.com/books?id=SxdZDwAAQBAJ. Retrieved 2019-05-10. 
  11. ↑ Bodó, Balázs (2014). "A Short History of the Russian Digital Shadow Libraries". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2616631. ISSN 1556-5068. 
  12. ↑ "LibGen.lc Home Page". Library Genesis. http://LibGen.lc/stat.php. 
  13. ↑ shrine (2021-02-07). "Hey, shrine here. I made the original call to preserve Library Genesis because the project's simmering internal conflicts were coming to a head. The libgen.fun fork is the result of that conflict. You pose a good concern worth discussing openly.". http://www.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/lelp7y/reviving_the_libgen_community/gmiaj9h/. 
  14. ↑ Van der Sar, Ernesto (14 August 2024), Popular Shadow Library 'LibGen' Breaks Down Amidst Legal Troubles, TorrentFreak, https://torrentfreak.com/popular-shadow-library-libgen-breaks-down-amidst-legal-troubles-240814/ 
  15. ↑ Van der Sar, Ernesto (11 March 2021), ISPs and Rightsholders Unite to Block Pirate Sites in Germany, TorrentFreak, https://torrentfreak.com/isps-and-rightsholders-unite-to-block-pirate-sites-in-germany-210311/ 
  16. ↑ The World's 57 Largest Book Publishers, 2015, Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2015, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/international-book-news/article/67224-the-world-s-57-largest-book-publishers-2015.html .
  17. ↑ Van der Sar, Ernesto (9 June 2015), Elsevier Cracks Down on Pirated Scientific Articles, TorrentFreak, https://torrentfreak.com/elsevier-cracks-down-on-pirated-scientific-articles-150609/ 
  18. ↑ Van der Sar, Ernesto (22 June 2015), Libgen Goes Down As Legal Pressure Mounts, TorrentFreak, https://torrentfreak.com/libgen-goes-down-as-legal-pressure-mounts-150622/ 
  19. ↑ "Court Orders Shutdown of LibGen, Bookfi and Sci-Hub - TorrentFreak". 2 November 2015. https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-shutdown-of-libgen-bookfi-and-sci-hub-151102/. 
  20. ↑ Schiermeier, Quirin (2015). "Pirate research-paper sites play hide-and-seek with publishers". Nature. doi:10.1038/nature.2015.18876. https://www.nature.com/news/pirate-research-paper-sites-play-hide-and-seek-with-publishers-1.18876. Retrieved 2015-12-06. 
  21. ↑ "Sci-hub, bookfi and libgen resurface after being shut down". TorrentFreak. 21 November 2015. https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-and-libgen-resurface-after-being-shut-down-151121/. 
  22. ↑ Milliott, Jim; Wischenbart, Ruediger (17 October 2024), The 10 Largest Publishers in the World, Publishers Weekly, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/international/Frankfurt-Book-Fair/article/96238-the-ten-largest-publishers-in-the-world.html 
  23. ↑ M., Zul (22 July 2023), 10 Largest Publishers in the World (2023), https://publishingstate.com/10-largest-publishers-in-the-world-2/2023/ 
  24. ↑ Maxwell, Andy (15 September 2023), Publishers' Lawsuit Accuses Libgen of "Staggering" Copyright Infringement, TorrentFreak, https://torrentfreak.com/publishers-lawsuit-accuses-libgen-of-staggering-copyright-infringement-230915/ 
  25. ↑ Van der Sar, Ernesto (4 March 2024), Publishers Target LibGen Domains, IPFS Gateways, Plus $30m in Piracy Damages, TorrentFreak, https://torrentfreak.com/publishers-target-libgen-domains-ipfs-gateways-and-seek-30m-in-piracy-damages240304/ 
  26. ↑ Belanger, Ashley (2024-09-26). "Pirate library must pay publishers $30M, but no one knows who runs it" (in en-US). ArsTechnica. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-must-pay-publishers-30m-but-no-one-knows-who-runs-it/. 
  27. ↑ Mance, Henry (2015-05-26). "Publishers win landmark case against ebook pirates". Financial Times. ISSN 0307-1766. https://www.ft.com/content/988850e0-038c-11e5-a70f-00144feabdc0. 
  28. ↑ Kamen, Matt (2015-05-27). "UK ISPs must block ebook pirate sites (Wired UK)". Wired UK. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/high-court-blocks-pirate-ebook-sites. Retrieved 2017-08-18. 
  29. ↑ Rees, Marc (2019-03-30). "Les principaux FAI français doivent bloquer Sci-Hub et LibGen". Next INpact. https://www.nextinpact.com/news/107689-les-principaux-fai-francais-doivent-bloquer-sci-hub-et-libgen.htm. 
  30. ↑ Maxwell, Andy (2018-08-08). "Vodafone Blocks LibGen Following Elsevier, Springer & Macmillan Injunction". TorrentFreak. https://torrentfreak.com/vodafone-blocks-libgen-following-elsevier-springer-macmillan-injunction-180808/. 
  31. ↑ "Decisions of the Committee - ΟΡΓΑΝΙΣΜΟΣ ΠΝΕΥΜΑΤΙΚΗΣ ΙΔΙΟΚΤΗΣΙΑΣ". https://opi.gr/en/committee1/decisions-committee. 
  32. ↑ Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni. "Delibera 178-18-CSP - Documento - AGCOM". https://www.agcom.it/documentazione/documento?p_p_auth=fLw7zRht&p_p_id=101_INSTANCE_FnOw5lVOIXoE&p_p_lifecycle=0&p_p_col_id=column-1&p_p_col_count=1&_101_INSTANCE_FnOw5lVOIXoE_struts_action=%2Fasset_publisher%2Fview_content&_101_INSTANCE_FnOw5lVOIXoE_assetEntryId=11533826&_101_INSTANCE_FnOw5lVOIXoE_type=document. 
  33. ↑ "Les éditeurs scientifiques se liguent contre la piraterie" (in fr). 2019-10-16. https://www.lecho.be/entreprises/technologie/les-editeurs-scientifiques-se-liguent-contre-la-piraterie/10172391.html. 
  34. ↑ "Denmark Blocks Sci-Hub Plus Streaming, Torrent & YouTube-Ripping Sites" (in en). 2019-09-26. https://torrentfreak.com/denmark-blocks-sci-hub-plus-streaming-torrent-youtube-ripping-sites-190926/. 
  35. ↑ "Sci-Hub "Pirate Bay of Science" Blocked in Russia Over Medical Studies * TorrentFreak" (in en). November 30, 2018. https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-pirate-bay-of-science-blocked-in-russia-over-medical-studies-181130/. 
  36. ↑ Van der Sar, Ernesto (March 23, 2024). "Dutch Court Orders ISP to Block 'Anna's Archive' and 'LibGen'". TorrentFreak. Archived from the original on March 23, 2024. https://archive.today/20240323113246/https://torrentfreak.com/dutch-court-orders-isp-to-block-annas-archive-and-libgen-240322/. Retrieved March 23, 2024. 
  37. ↑ Knibbs, Kate. "Meta Secretly Trained Its AI on a Notorious Piracy Database, Newly Unredacted Court Docs Reveal" (in en-US). Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. https://www.wired.com/story/new-documents-unredacted-meta-copyright-ai-lawsuit/. Retrieved 2025-03-21. 
  38. ↑ Reisner, Alex (March 20, 2025). "The Unbelievable Scale of AI's Pirated-Books Problem". The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libgen-meta-openai/682093/. 
  39. ↑ Himmelstein, Daniel S; Romero, Ariel Rodriguez; Levernier, Jacob G; Munro, Thomas Anthony; McLaughlin, Stephen Reid; Greshake Tzovaras, Bastian; Greene, Casey S (2018-03-01). "Sci-Hub provides access to nearly all scholarly literature" (in en). eLife 7. doi:10.7554/eLife.32822. ISSN 2050-084X. PMID 29424689. 
  40. ↑ Gault, Matthew (2019-12-02). "Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure a 'Pirate Bay of Science' Never Goes Down" (in en). Vice. https://www.vice.com/en/article/archivists-are-trying-to-make-sure-a-pirate-bay-of-science-never-goes-down/. 
  41. ↑ "Meet the Guy Behind the LibGen Torrent Seeding Movement * TorrentFreak" (in en). https://torrentfreak.com/meet-the-guy-behind-the-libgen-torrent-seeding-movement-191205/. 
  42. ↑ "IPFS Free Library". https://freeread.org/ipfs.html. 
  43. ↑ "p2p Free Library: Help build humanity's free library on IPFS with Sci-Hub and Library Genesis". 14 October 2020. https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/jb1hkn/p2p_free_library_help_build_humanitys_free/. 

Further reading



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