User:Tash/RW&RM 03

Shadow libraries / piracy tools

Europe, Russia

• Open Access Button (2013) https://openaccessbutton.org
  • In their own words: "Instantly find and request research articles and data you need with the Open Access Button. Legally crushing paywalls since 2013."
  • tracking how often users hit paywalls on academic sites, finding legal copies. not a piracy tool but expands access to scientific knowledge

• Bibliotheca (2013?) http://bibliotecha.info/
  • In their own words: "Bibliotecha is a framework to facilitate the local distribution of digital publications within a small community. It relies on a microcomputer running open-source software to serve books over a local wifi hotspot."
  • not necessarily a shadow library but allows for file sharing between personal collections

• Radical Militant Library (Jotunbane’s Reading Club) (2010) https://c3jemx2ube5v5zpg.onion https://github.com/RadicalMilitantLibrary
  • In their own words: "Jotunbane started a Reading Club / online library and publishing system. It is totally free in all aspects and believes in freedom of information. You can access the onion service via Tor network. This web interface is an attempt to raise the quality of ebooks."

• Library Genesis http://gen.lib.rus.ec
  • est. March 2008, has multiple interfaces, mirrors and versions

• Memory of the world http://library.memoryoftheworld.org
  • Est. 2012 by Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak as a proof of concept of the Public Library initiative.

• Monoskop (2004) http://monoskop.org
  • digital library and wiki for collaborative studies of the arts, media and humanities. Founded and curated by Dusan Barok.
  • Free to edit, download and upload

• Sci-hub (2011) http://sci-hub.io/
  • In their own words: "The first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers."

• https://bibliotik.me
  • Bibliotik (BiB) is a torrent site for e books, with a huge collection of e-books and audiobooks in various formats, as well as a rapidly growing collection of magazines, comics, journals and e-learning apps.
  • invite only

• Internet Archive (1996)
  • In their own words: "The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge."
  • Anyone with a free account can upload media

• Project Runeberg http://runeberg.org/katalog.html
  • In their own words: "A volunteer effort to create free electronic editions of classic Nordic (Scandinavian) literature and make them openly available over the Internet."
  • intended only for out of copyright books

• Anarchist Library
  • In their own wordsL "theanarchistlibrary.org is (despite its name) an archive focusing on anarchism, anarchist texts, and texts of interest for anarchists."
  • "This library provides (together with the on-line version of each text) one or more high quality PDFs in various sizes and and formats, as well as its plain text sources, and an EPUB version for mobile platforms. We actively encourage the DIY printing and the distribution of the texts"

• Textz.com (2001) http://www.textz.com
  • Textz.com was a warez database for texts. Run by Sebastian Lütgert/ROLUX since 2001 with the slogan »we are the & in copy & paste«.
  • One could find text with and without copyright, fictional and theoretical texts, manifestos, articles and song texts. Texts were either submitted by the authors themselves, supplied to the textz.com database by various online collaborators as freely circulating texts on the Net, or they were scanned in from printed media page by page, processed via a text recognition program, and transformed into ASCII files.
  • Under threat of arrest pursuant the legal action taken by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research on behalf of the Theodor Adorno estate for publishing of two Adorno texts, the website was taken offline and laid dormant.

• volafile.io
  • Live filesharing & chat
  • averaging at least a million monthly users

• The Piratebay @ Worm http://thepiratebay.worm.org
  • In their own words: "The WORM Pirate Bay hosts an eclectic collection of avant-garde media; from zines and books to CDs and DVDs. You can burn DVDs, digitise the VHS tapes, and copy books and magazines using our photocopier. The WPB is not just any free media archive with pirated content. It also features art installations that make you question the act of looking, seeing, and consuming media."
  • physical library in Rotterdam

• The Piracy Project http://andpublishing.org/the-piracy-project/
  • In their own words: "An international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and creative modes of reproduction. Through research and an international call for submissions, the Project has gathered a collection of more than 150 modified, appropriated and copied books from all over the world."

USA

• #icanhazpdf (2011) https://twitter.com/hashtag/icanhazpdf?src=hash
  • using hashtags to request files via twitter network
  • power of community, file sharing one to one

• Project Gutenberg (1971) http://gutenberg.org
  • In their own words: "The mission of Project Gutenberg is simple: To encourage the creation and distribution of eBooks. [...] Project Gutenberg approves about 99% of all requests from those who would like to make our eBooks and give them away, within their various local copyright limitations. Project Gutenberg is powered by ideas, ideals, and by idealism. Project Gutenberg is not powered by financial or political power."
  • Founded by Michael Hart, Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks.

• aaaaarg (2005) http://aaaaarg.fail
  • Aaaaarg.org is an online repository with over 50,000 books and texts. Started by Sean Dockray as a way to serve schools in USA and support autodidact activities
  • invite-based membership required to download books
  • has grown into a community of researchers and enthusiasts who maintain, catalog, annotate and run discussions on the platform

• #bookz on IRCHighway/undernet

• UBU-web (1996) http://ubu.com
  • "All avant-garde. All the time." sound, poetry and art
  • In their own words: "UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment, allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise our audience . . . and even ourselves."

Asia

• Pad.ma (2008) https://pad.ma/
  • In their own words: "Pad.ma - short for Public Access Digital Media Archive - is an online archive of densely text-annotated video material, primarily footage and not finished films. The entire collection is searchable and viewable online, and is free to download for non-commercial use."
  • The archive expands upon the perhaps inevitable destiny of all video in digital form: that it becomes possible to distribute, share, annotate, reuse and re-interpret it, even as the original "author's" intentions expire, and contexts change

• Aozora Bunko (1997) https://www.aozora.gr.jp
  • the Japanese Project Gutenberg
  • was created to provide broadly available, free access to Japanese literary works whose copyrights had expired
  • Aozora Bunko has joined with others in organizing to oppose changes in Japanese copyright law