4 ms·

> regular people can help Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understandin

by bhaney 2y ago

> regular people can help Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understanding is that if I seed these torrents I'm going to get spammed with DMCA letters from publishers until my ISP gives up and cuts my service. If we need to seed exclusively through tor or VPNs in copyright-notice-ignoring countries, then that's not all that accessible to "regular people" anymore.

zozbot234 2y ago
I wonder just how much of this "shadow library" content is stuff that's actually in the public domain and could be mirrored with no legal jeopardy whatsoever. Unfortunately, the low quality of catalog-like metadata that's available from so-called "shadow libraries" (including the one that's linked in the top comment) makes this a very hard question to answer. Even if that makes up only a handful of TB's or so, it would be worth mirroring the stuff - among other things, a reliable repository of copyright-free content would also be a valuable resource for "ethical" AI training and other such uses. (I know that the linked blogpost mentions that they just don't bother mirroring "widely available collections" of public domain books. The interesting question is whether there's some "long tail" of PD content that might not have made it to the more well-known collections as of yet.)
squigz 2y ago
FWIW, I've been getting (automated) DMCA notices for years (since 2015 or so) with no warnings or anything like that from my ISP. They just forward the notices because they have to. Not to say there's no risks here, but this really depends on your jurisdiction, I think.
- op00to 2y ago
  My ISP, Verizon, has threatened me with shutting off my service after a single notice when my kid discovered bit torrent.

4 ms·

> regular people can help Can we? I have tens of terabytes of unused storage space that I would be happy to contribute to library archival, but my understandin

by bhaney 2y ago

zozbot234 2y ago
I wonder just how much of this "shadow library" content is stuff that's actually in the public domain and could be mirrored with no legal jeopardy whatsoever. Unfortunately, the low quality of catalog-like metadata that's available from so-called "shadow libraries" (including the one that's linked in the top comment) makes this a very hard question to answer. Even if that makes up only a handful of TB's or so, it would be worth mirroring the stuff - among other things, a reliable repository of copyright-free content would also be a valuable resource for "ethical" AI training and other such uses. (I know that the linked blogpost mentions that they just don't bother mirroring "widely available collections" of public domain books. The interesting question is whether there's some "long tail" of PD content that might not have made it to the more well-known collections as of yet.)
squigz 2y ago
FWIW, I've been getting (automated) DMCA notices for years (since 2015 or so) with no warnings or anything like that from my ISP. They just forward the notices because they have to. Not to say there's no risks here, but this really depends on your jurisdiction, I think.
- op00to 2y ago
  My ISP, Verizon, has threatened me with shutting off my service after a single notice when my kid discovered bit torrent.