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Books Crime The Courts

Feds Arrest Russians Accused of Running the Largest Pirated E-Book Library 73

Posted by BeauHD from the textbook-piracy dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last month, the alleged masterminds behind Z-Library -- an e-book pirate site that claims to be "the world's largest library" -- were arrested. According to a press release yesterday from the US Department of Justice, Russian nationals Anton Napolsky and Valeriia Ermakova have been charged with "criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud and money laundering for operating Z-Library." "As alleged, the defendants profited illegally off work they stole, often uploading works within mere hours of publication, and in the process victimized authors, publishers, and booksellers," Breon Peace, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement.

At the request of the US government, Napolsky and Ermakova were arrested in Argentina on November 3. On the same day, the US government seized "a complex network of approximately 249 interrelated web domains," the press release said. For many less web-savvy users, the domain seizure essentially shut down access to Z-Library's 11 million e-books, but anyone on the dark web knows it's still up and running -- suggesting that while arresting Napolsky and Ermakova has stifled Z-Library, it has not shuttered it, and it could come back. TorrentFreak reported that it's still unknown if the pair has been involved with Z-Library since the start. Michael J. Driscoll, the assistant director in charge at the New York Federal Bureau of Investigation field office, seems to suspect they have. Although the indictment is only focused on the duo's alleged criminal activity between 2018 and 2022, Driscoll said that they are believed to have "operated a website for over a decade whose central purpose was providing stolen intellectual property, in violation of copyright laws."

"Intellectual property theft crimes deprive their victims of both ingenuity and hard-earned revenue," Driscoll said. "The FBI is determined to ensure those willing to steal and profit from the creativity of others are stopped and made to face the consequences in the criminal justice system." If Napolsky and Ermakova are charged, the indictment said that they will be required to "forfeit any property, real or personal, constituting, or derived from, proceeds obtained directly or indirectly as a result of such offenses." TorrentFreak reported that Argentina has not yet received a request from the US to extradite the accused Z-Library operators, but that will be the next step toward shutting down Z-Library. "Z-Library has linked eager readers to millions of free e-books since 2009, but it wasn't until Z-Library began recently trending on TikTok that authors protesting the piracy decided enough was enough," adds Ars. The TikTok hashtag #zlibrary was viewed 19 million times, which spurred The Authors Guild to complain to the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

"Z-Library is killing us," romance writer Sarina Bowen told officials. "A book we release in the morning is up on Z-Library by lunchtime. This isn't the only site that hurts us, but it's the site that keeps showing up in TikTok videos."
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Feds Arrest Russians Accused of Running the Largest Pirated E-Book Library More

Feds Arrest Russians Accused of Running the Largest Pirated E-Book Library

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  • trade them to get Brittney Griner back!

  • "Are they talking about the bordello?"
    "No! The burlesque house. So just keep your mouth shut."

  • One day (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xenog ( 3653043 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @05:16PM (#63059310)
    One day copyright law will be abolished, and the practice of prosecuting copyright infringers will be obnoxious to our descendants.

    • Re:One day (Score:4, Insightful)

      by The MAZZTer ( 911996 ) <megazzt.gmail@com> on Thursday November 17, 2022 @06:13PM (#63059510) Homepage
      Copyright is important to preserve the rights of authors of creative works. However in its current state copyright law is too much and does need a kick in the teeth.

      • I knew someone would trot out the "rights" argument.

        "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)

        Your statement doesn't include the "limited times" component. That is crucial to the balance of 1) the author, to motivate them (not guarantee!) to spend their time to write down ideas and stories and to be compensated for it, whil

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by jslaff ( 881873 )
      As an author, what would be my incentive to write, except for my own enjoyment?

  • Should have stayed in Russia (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @05:20PM (#63059318)
    Lot of Russian nationals are going to find themselves with arrest warrants in the West for piracy/hacking/war crimes if they make the mistake of leaving the beloved Motherland (well maybe they could vacation in China as well).

    No rush, take your time. We have long memories.
    • It works both ways. Russia could kidnap US citizens for breaking Russian laws. This is a dangerous precedent.
      • Big brain here. The Russians were violating copyright law in the country they were residing in, Argentina, as well as the US (and any other number of countries with copyright infringement laws). They were extradited accordingly.

        If US citizens in say, Serbia, were violating Russian and Serbian laws concurrently, they should absolutely be fair game.https://news.slashdot.org/users.pl

      • It works both ways. Russia could kidnap US citizens for breaking Russian laws. This is a dangerous precedent.

        Not really, they already do that. It's why westerners should never go to Russia, or China, or North Korea or Iran or Belarus and various other Neosoviet client states where there are no civil or human rights.

        The difference is that they are much more likely to want to come to the West than we are wanting to go to those lawless places. If they stay in their shithole dictatorships they will (or at least might) be fine, and if we stay in our relatively free countries we should be fine as well. Would be ki

  • Uhm ... no? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by solidraven ( 1633185 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @05:28PM (#63059342)
    This part is definitely not true: "process victimized authors, publishers, and booksellers,"

    I'm an author, I had to use this website to access the book I wrote several chapters of because the publisher decided to be greedy and charge the authors an exuberant amount for a copy. Fuck Elsevier.
    • But but The Authors Guild says it is so !

      Are you trying to say they have other priorities than protecting authors ?!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by quonset ( 4839537 )

      This part is definitely not true: "process victimized authors, publishers, and booksellers,"

      I'm an author, I had to use this website to access the book I wrote several chapters of because the publisher decided to be greedy and charge the authors an exuberant amount for a copy. Fuck Elsevier.

      You didn't keep your own copy of the book you wrote? Did you suffer a recent blow to the head?

    • Re:Uhm ... no? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Local ID10T ( 790134 ) <ID10T.L.USER@gmail.com> on Thursday November 17, 2022 @07:31PM (#63059706) Homepage

      This part is definitely not true: "process victimized authors, publishers, and booksellers,"

      I'm an author, I had to use this website to access the book I wrote several chapters of because the publisher decided to be greedy and charge the authors an exuberant amount for a copy. Fuck Elsevier.

      I'm a bookseller. I also do not feel victimized.

      Copyright is supposed to exist "to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries". (US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)

      Eternal access restrictions for the benefit of profit-mongers should not be a thing.

  • There goes my best way of previewing cookbooks...

  • Killing us? (Score:3)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @05:41PM (#63059388) Homepage
    How much damage is really happening from Z-Library? I understand that work is being stolen and posted for piracy, but how much is that truly impacting the author? Are authors seeing a sizable hit to their bottom line?

    • How much damage is really happening from Z-Library? I understand that work is being stolen and posted for piracy, but how much is that truly impacting the author? Are authors seeing a sizable hit to their bottom line?

      If they're not getting paid for their work, yes.

      • Only if the damage amounts to anything that would be considered reasonable. Are they loosing 1% of their sales, 10%, or 0.00001%? Maybe the problem is bad enough that they're loosing what amounts to a meaningful percentage of their income, but it would be interesting to see that figure.

        • Only if the damage amounts to anything that would be considered reasonable. Are they loosing 1% of their sales, 10%, or 0.00001%? Maybe the problem is bad enough that they're loosing what amounts to a meaningful percentage of their income, but it would be interesting to see that figure.

          So then San Francisco saying they won't punish people who take a certain dollar amount of goods from a store is doing the righ thing since it's a reasonable amount. Got it.

          • So then San Francisco saying they won't punish people who take a certain dollar amount of goods from a store is doing the righ thing since it's a reasonable amount. Got it.

            That is for sure a judgement call. Certainly if you are spending tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars to detain and/or punish someone for stealing a loaf of bread then you are not entitled to complain about waste in government.

            • Exactly! There's a fair chance the amount of money being lost or taken from the authors is substantial, which I would declare as 1% of their income or higher. There's also a fair chance the amount is effectively meaningless, such that an average author is losing the equivalent of a loaf of bread. If the loss is a loaf, then who cares and let it go, if the loss is 1% or higher, then you have a serious problem that needs to be tackled. My point was, it would be interesting to get some hard numbers on the i
      • Make that:
            If they're not getting paid for work that they would otherwise have been paid for, and not getting paid more for work through generating interest with the freebies - see the comment from Vaelynx below.

        It might actually hit the really big authors. Hence this action.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by caseih ( 160668 )

        I'm unlikely to buy a random author's e-book unless I can read a significant preview of it first. At least a chapter. Fortunately Kindle lets me return a book before finishing it, which I have done. Most books are mediocre at best. Z-Library was a fantastic tool for checking out new literature, which I am wont to buy, often in dead-tree format. I also used it to format-shift some old books I have (1950s and 60s) into a convenient ebook format.

        Despite massive copyright infringement, I suspect strongly t

    • I understand that work is being stolen and posted for piracy

      Your understanding is false. There is no theft involved. All what happens is that an additional copy is created and made accessible to the general public. The process of copying and making accessible is prohibited, but does not constitute theft. The rightful owners still retain ownership of their copies.

  • Once again we see the age old tradition of printing books is superior to technology. Show us how many books are being physicaly copied and sold on the black market. The cost to do so isn't worth the effort.

  • Another "win" for greedy scumbags (Score:3)

    by VAElynx ( 2001046 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @05:57PM (#63059442)
    I won't even address the publishers and other whiny middlemen - they brought it on themselves and deserve little but scorn for their practices. More so for any involved in anything scientific or technical. As for authors though...

    Bluntly, book piracy has the opposite effect to what you think, because in the end, the null option is not bothering with your works. In fact, it's had the opposite effect - there's at least two book series I originally got hooked on by copies transferred to me by friends, whose latter installments in paper I bought and had mailed to me whenever released, generating altogether around five hundred bucks of revenue just from the ones I can think of - and that's revenue that absolutely wouldn't exist otherwise because I rarely buy a "cat in a bag".
  • They copied the books from the largest e-book library, libgen ( which is freely downloadable ) and added some books to it, making theirs "the largest e-book library".

    If that gives the Authors Guild and the other copyright bastards a hard-on, woop-dee-doo.

    People will stop sharing books when copyright terms are REASONABLE. Think 5 years instead of fucking 95 years.
  • Stealing books the day they were published is wrong, but how is the FBI, a federal bureau, able to operate outside their country to have Russian citizens extracted from Argentina, so that they could be prosecuted under US Laws. This seems like an incredible overreach of jurisdiction. By extension, Russia could kidnap US citizens and charge them with violating their laws. Russia or China could have US citizens extradited from a third country to be charge for crimes that were committed outside of their count

  • Z-Library is the best place... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Thursday November 17, 2022 @06:25PM (#63059540)
    ...to find books that are only bought by academic libraries & typically cost $100+ for a small book of a collection of articles &/or papers loosely collated together around a particular topic or theme by the editor for the purpose of spreading knowledge as far as they can or some large reference volume of a similar nature closer to $500+, maybe $1,000+ for some. There really isn't much money in it for the authors, as one academic put it, "Ooh, maybe I could buy a pair of socks with my share!" To you or me, they're not really worth the price the publishers charge. Academic libraries pay for them to provide access to their staff & students & sometimes it's problematic even when they are supposed to have access. It's no wonder those staff, possibly the authors, then upload them to Z-Library so that they can get a wider readership. I have downloaded dozens of books from Z-Library, among other sites, several on the recommendations of the books' contributing authors. They're just happy that someone's reading their work.

    According to Wikipedia: "Z-Library (abbreviated as z-lib, formerly BookFinder) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts and general-interest books. It originated as a mirror of Library Genesis, from which most of its books originate.[3] Individuals can also upload files.[4]

    Z-Library was ranked as the 8,182th most active website by the Alexa Traffic Rank service in October 2021.[5] It is especially popular in emerging economies and among academics.[6] As of October 1, 2022, Z-Library reported having more than 11,291,325 books and 84,837,643 articles.[7] It also describes itself as "the world's largest e-book library", as well as "the world's largest scientific articles store", and as a non-profit organization sustained by donations." - Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    So, good job nobody's told TikTok or the FBI about Library Genesis yet.

  • For a moment I was sure the headline read as:

    "Feds Accused of Running the Largest Pirated E-Book Library Z-Lib"

    Wouldn't that be a hoot?!

  • Cut the head of one and two more will come back in its place.

    Hail Hydra.

  • Maybe Putin will pay more.

  • Z-Library is still accessible with Tor Browser. So all is not lost.

  • Can someone shoot me an invite to the Dark Web? I want to see what this whole Z-Library thing is about.Sounds like there's a lot of sensible people in that there Dark Web.
  • I support copyright. However, the private sector has heavily lobbied and succeeded in destroying fair use at every level. Normal people can't compete against Disney and the MPAA. Copyright is your legal RIGHT to copy. Inb4, "build your own planet\nation\reality if you don't like it!"
  • I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of students suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
  • The indictment states "As alleged, the defendants profited illegally off work they stole, often uploading works within mere hours of publication, and in the process victimized authors, publishers and booksellers". But z-lib did not charge anything, and did not have ads. So how, exactly, did they profit?

  • ...nobody reads books anymore!

    Ha ha fuck you Russia!

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