The popular online book download site Z bookcase, Widely used by readers and students around the world, it was withdrawn from service by the US State Department this Friday. The site is inaccessible.
“This domain was seized by the United States Postal Inspection Service under a court order,” the page said while attempting to log in. However, no further information is available.
In most cases, these sites are removed because the files uploaded there for download do not have the permission of the publishers, which constitutes the crime of infringement of intellectual property (piracy).
During Friday, the websites hosted on z-lib.org, b-ok.org and 3lib.net started displaying a message stating that the service had been seized by the US Department of Justice and the Postal Inspection Service, as shown below. Subsequently, the seizure notice on 3lib.net was updated to indicate that the domains were seized by the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
However, the reasons for the decline are not entirely clear. Some users reported receiving a message from Z-Library blaming the problem of “a server crash by one of our hosting providers”, not a government action.
The context, however, points to a halt to piracy: Recently, ISPs have come under increasing pressure to block shadow libraries due to copyright infringement. Courts in some countries, including France and India, have ruled that vendors must block Z-Library.
At the moment, all servers were closed and the domain was blocked by the US government.
What is the Z library
Z-Library is what is known as a “Library of shadows”– Upload books that users can download for free. They are a headache for publishers and are in constant conflict, which usually leads to the removal of websites from the websites hosting these files.
On the side of those who defend these systems there are costs: in many cases, due to the high price of books, access to culture or even to study is blocked.
Some antecedents of this type of legal battles can be found in the case of Jstor with Aaron Swartzan activist who downloaded a large number of articles from the famous academic database and ended up being prosecuted until he took his own life.
The networks were already taking measures. A few days ago, the TorrentFreak site warned that TikTok had decided to block hashtags related to Z-Library, allegedly in response to complaints from copyright holders.
“Reducing user visibility of content that violates our Community Guidelines is of the utmost importance,” explained TikTok.
In the meantime, it remains to await more details on the warning that has arrived from the United States. Many times, however, these online libraries find a way around these controls, such as streaming their content through chat channels or alternative browsers to Chrome, Edge, and Firefox.
Source: Clarin
