On Thursday, some links to the notorious shadow library Library Genesis (Libgen) couldn’t be reached after a US district court judge, Colleen McMahon, ordered what TorrentFreak called “one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions” ever issued by a US court.
In her order, McMahon sided with textbook publishers who accused Libgen of willful copyright infringement after Libgen completely ignored their complaint.
To compensate rightsholders, McMahon ordered Libgen to pay $30 million, but because nobody knows who runs the shadow library, it seems unlikely that publishers will be paid any time soon, if ever.
The index is distributed. The files are hosted in multiple places. Historically, some of the storage spots have been compromised web servers. There are copies in ipfs.
I get the feeling it’s maintained by a collective. No idea how they coordinate content acquisition or update indexes. It’s pretty well updated.
God bless that collective. Doing gods work