Others will carry the torch. Silk Road was proof of that. Of course, it’s little consolation to Ulbricht, but he deserved to be imprisoned for ordering hits. (I

Others will carry the torch. Silk Road was proof of that. Of course, it’s little consolation to Ulbricht, but he deserved to be imprisoned for ordering hits. (Incidentally, I was skeptical of that claim till https://youtu.be/GpMP6Nh3FvU?si=q0KXzP2FNJDin2tW https://youtu.be/GpMP6Nh3FvU?si=q0KXzP2FNJDin2tW.) The benefit of Anna’s Archive is that they have goodwill on their side. They are trying to contribute to academic research directly, whereas libgen seems to prioritize profit (and has to, to survive). Anna’s Archive does that too. The "donations" are actually paying to access features. But by proactively reaching out to the academic community like this, they’ll make a lot of powerful allies. EDIT: on second thought, how does libgen monetize? I thought they ran ads, but I just realized I didn’t verify that. Whoever runs a library like this for altruistic reasons stands to win. The desire to get rich is most of the problem with doing shady things scalably. One can argue that it’s the risk/reward tradeoff, but I suspect as technology makes everything more accessible, an operation like this only costs a few thousand a month. That’s achievable while flying under the radar long enough to hopefully avoid getting in a lot of trouble. Of course, as with death note, everything comes down to: don’t get caught.