Running, protecting and supporting these shadow libraries is one of the biggest service to contemporary's humankind's written culture that can be done nowadays.

Running, protecting and supporting these shadow libraries is one of the biggest service to contemporary's humankind's written culture that can be done nowadays. Sometimes the discussion is just on "copyright" and "for knowledge to be free", but some older material is actually realistically impossible or extremely hard/time consuming to find out of these shadow libraries. Money is not the only problem that makes certain material inaccessible. Having these places shut down and their material disappear by copyright predator firms would be catastrophic in a way that has probably not happened since events like the burning of the library of Alexandria. The current state of AI just makes it even more important.