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In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
Shadow libraries, also referred to as pirate libraries or black open access, are online repositories of freely available digital media that are normally paywalled, access-controlled, or otherwise not readily accessible.[1][2] Shadow libraries usually contain textual works such as academic papers and ebooks, and may include other digital media like software, music, or films.
Anna's Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, UbuWeb and Z-Library are some of the most popular shadow libraries for books and academic literature.[1][3][4]
 | The examples and perspectives in this section deal primarily with Russia and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (February 2025) |
Early predecessors to shadow libraries were informal collections of unauthorized digital copies of books, scholarly literature, and other textual media, often shared with small groups via mailing lists, forums, or social media websites.[1]: 1 Online communities of scientists also collaborated to share paywalled literature among themselves.[5]
Many shadow libraries originate in Russia, which has a rich history of samizdat stemming from the Soviet era. There was strict state censorship and control of print materials, which gave rise to the dissident activity of copying and disseminating censored or underground works. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the official censorship program, these sharing practices continued as a result of widespread economic hardship.[1]: 31–33 Texts were widely digitized and shared on Russian FidoNet systems as computer and internet access became more widespread in Russia. One early collection of digitized texts was Maksim Moshkow's 1994 Lib.ru.[1]: 34–35 The Russian Kolkhoz collection, named for the kolkhoz collective farms, was created by a community that worked in the early 2000s to download or digitize scientific texts, which they stored on FTP servers and DVDs. This collection eventually grew to around 50,000 documents.[1]: 37
Some of these early collections later became shadow libraries as they attracted volunteer librarians who catalogued the archives' contents. Early academic shadow libraries in the 2000s included Textz.org, Monoskop, and Gigapedia (later Library.nu). Gigapedia focused more on academic texts than other shadow libraries, which mainly contained literature.[1]: 26–27 Around 2006 or 2007, it incorporated the files amassed by the Kolkhoz collectors,[1]: 37 and had become the largest shadow library by 2010.[1]: 26–27 Gigapedia, by then renamed to Library.nu, was shut down in 2012 through a lawsuit from a coalition of seventeen publishing companies including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, and MacMillan.[1]: 26–27 [6]
Library Genesis (also known as LibGen) was founded in approximately 2007 or 2008 by a group of Russian scientists, who began by organizing a collection of Russian science and technology texts made available on a torrent site, aggregated from sources including the Kolkhoz collection and lib.ru.[1]: 27–28, 38 In 2011, LibGen absorbed the Library.nu collection, keeping it accessible even as Library.nu was forced to shut down. At the time, LibGen was unique in its focus on its open library infrastructure, prioritizing the free sharing of its collection, catalog, and source code to encourage many others to increase shadow libraries' collective resiliency by mirroring and forking the project.[1]: 27–28 As of 2025, Library Genesis "claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comic files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues."[7]
Shadow libraries are part of the open access and open knowledge movements.[1]: 6 [8] They seek to more freely disseminate academic scholarship and other media, often citing a moral imperative to make knowledge freely available.[2]
LibGen's operators have described the site's mission as enabling access to information for poor people and opposing the gating of knowledge by elite academic institutions, with one administrator writing "the target groups for LibGen are poors: Africa, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, China, Russia and post-USSR etc., and on a separate note, people who do not belong to academia. If you are not at a university, you can't access anything or at least your access will be so much troubled that you won't be able to progress at all."[1]: 28 Alexandra Elbakyan, the creator of Sci-Hub, has justified the site by arguing that the lack of open access to scholarship violates the human right to science and culture, captured in Article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: "Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits."[9] Elbakyan has also argued that "Any law against knowledge is fundamentally unjust".[10] American activist Aaron Swartz captured the motivations of many shadow libraries in his 2008 Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,[1]: 28–29 writing:
The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. ... Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves.
— Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto[11]
Shadow libraries have also cited the increasing cost of academic literature and books, also termed the "serials crisis".[12]
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Some shadow libraries (or their content databases) make use of BitTorrent (mainly for database dumps), dark web, and InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) technologies to increase their resilience or distribute loads.[13][14][3][2][15] Shadow libraries including LibGen and Anna's Archive develop and make their software accessible as open source software, enabling code development by any volunteer and encouraging mirrors or forks.[1]: 27–28 [16] Anna's Archive claims that "if we get taken down we'll just pop right up elsewhere, since all our code and data is fully open source".[16]
Shadow libraries often host or link to copyrighted material without the consent of copyright holders, making them illegal or dubiously legal in many countries.[1] Such libraries are also described as pirate libraries.[10][1]: 4 Many shadow libraries maintain bibliographic catalogs separate from the hosting of files themselves. This is both an organizational convenience and a protection against legal challenges, since the law is often ambiguous on the distinction between hosting and indexing copyrighted content. However, several shadow library catalogs have been the target of injunctions and takedown threats.[1]: 25–26
The aggressive legal strategies pursued by Western music and film industries against online filesharing websites during the 2000s were not widely mirrored by academic or literary publishers against shadow libraries. However, as shadow libraries have grown larger and more visible, they have attracted more legal challenges. Library.nu (previously Gigapedia) was shut down in 2012 by a lawsuit from a coalition of seventeen publishing companies including HarperCollins, Oxford University Press, and MacMillan.[1]: 26–27 [6] In 2015, the academic publisher Elsevier sued LibGen and Sci-Hub in American courts, accusing them of "operat[ing] an international network of piracy and copyright infringement".[17] Elsevier won a default judgment against the two groups, and was awarded $15 million in damages, but has not collected the money as LibGen's operators are unknown and Sci-Hub's are outside the reach of US jurisdiction.[18] Although the judge in the Elsevier case granted an injunction against several domains used by the shadow libraries, briefly taking them offline, the libraries quickly moved to new domains and onion sites.[19][17] A lawsuit by the American Chemical Society in 2017 against Sci-Hub also resulted in a judgment order for $4.8 million in damages.[18] In November 2022, the FBI seized domains associated with Z-Library and charged two of its operators with criminal copyright infringement, wire fraud, and money laundering.[20] Courts have ordered Internet service providers in countries including Denmark, France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom to block access to pirate libraries,[21][22] although these blocks are of limited effectiveness.[23]
The legality of directing individuals to shadow libraries is undetermined. While there are legal theories that linking to copyright infringing material hosted by shadow libraries could constitute vicarious or contributory copyright infringement, there have been no cases brought with these theories. In 2019, Elsevier threatened legal action against Citationsy, the developer of a bibliography management tool, for publishing a blog post directing readers to Sci-Hub, and Citationsy removed the link.[24]
Although most academics are not penalized for distributing their own published works for free, academic publishers have threatened scientists for sharing or republishing their work.[25]
Some publishers have accused shadow libraries, including Sci-Hub, of illegally obtaining login credentials to academic databases, though Sci-Hub says the credentials are voluntarily donated.[26]
A class action lawsuit filed in June 2023 against ChatGPT developer OpenAI, led by authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad, alleged that the company used shadow libraries to source training data for their large language model.[27][28][29] Meta has also been alleged to have used data from shadow libraries to train its AI model.[30][31] DeepSeek's Vision-Language (VL) model was trained with data from the shadow library Anna's Archive.[32]
Some academics have tacitly or explicitly endorsed shadow library efforts,[1] with many viewing them as morally acceptable acts of civil disobedience against the abusive business models of academic publishers.[33] Furthermore, shadow libraries may increase the impact of academics whose work is made available. According to one study from Cornell University, articles that are available on Sci-Hub receive 1.72 times as many citations as articles from journals of similar quality that are not available on Sci-Hub.[34]
Non-academic writers have been more vocally opposed to shadow libraries.[10]
In February 2022, after joining a lawsuit with Amazon Publishing and Penguin Random House against a Ukrainian website selling pirated e-books, American bestselling fiction authors John Grisham and Scott Turow published an op-ed in The Hill calling on US lawmakers to pass a law prohibiting search engines from linking to piracy websites.[10][35]
In October 2022, the US-based Authors Guild submitted a complaint to the United States Trade Representative about LibGen and Z-Library, describing digital book piracy as "one of the biggest threats facing authors' livelihoods today".[36] The Authors Guild and the UK-based Publishers Association both worked with the FBI in efforts against Z-Library, which culminated with November 2022 the arrest of two of its operators.[20]
Other authors and writers' organizations have opposed such efforts. British novelist Alison Rumfitt wrote in Dazed that she was not celebrating the site's takedown, and that "the hunger to read is something to be encouraged, something which, in my opinion, is a societal good; even as publishing grows ever more overtly capitalist and monopolised, reading still thrives, and piracy allows it to take place despite borders and Digital Rights Management. Not everyone has access to a library, and not every library in the world is well-stocked."[37] Dave Hansen, executive director of the Authors Alliance nonprofit, expressed that students and researchers would be negatively impacted by attempts to shut down shadow libraries, and expressed that such projects were "a kind of symptom of how broken the system is, particularly when you're looking at access to scientific articles".[2]
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
Shadow libraries, also referred to as pirate libraries or black open access, are online repositories of freely available digital media that are normally paywalled, access-controlled, or otherwise not readily accessible. Shadow libraries usually contain textual works such as academic papers and ebooks, and may include other digital media like software, music, or films. Anna's Archive, Library Genesis, Sci-Hub, UbuWeb and Z-Library are some of the most popular shadow libraries for books and academic literature.
Z-Library (abbreviated as z-lib, formerly BookFinder) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts and general-interest books. It began as a mirror of Library Genesis but has expanded dramatically. According to the website's own data released in February 2023, its collection comprised over 13.35 million books and over 84.8 million articles. Z-Library is particularly popular in emerging economies and among academics. In June 2020, Z-Library was visited by around 2.84 million users, of whom 14.76% were from the United States. According to the Alexa Traffic Rank service, Z-Library was ranked as the 2,758th most active website in October 2021. The organization describes itself as "the world's largest e-book library" and "the world's largest scientific articles store;" however, this is contestable as Anna's Archive also claims this, with its slogan claiming a collection containing "63,632,048 books" and "95,689,475 [scientific] papers" that includes a full mirror of Z-Library. It operates as a non-profit organization sustained by donations. Besides sharing ebooks, Z-Library announced plans to expand their offerings to include physical paperback books at dedicated "Z-Points" around the globe. Z-Library and its activities are illegal in many jurisdictions. While website seizures reduce the accessibility of the content, it remains available on the dark web. The legal status of the project, as well as its potential impact on the publishing industry and authors' rights, is a matter of ongoing debate.
Black Mirror is a British science fiction anthology series created by Charlie Brooker. The programme was inspired by The Twilight Zone and explores technology and its side-effects. It began on the British television network Channel 4 before moving to the American streaming platform Netflix and has run for seven series between 2011 and 2025. There are 33 episodes and one interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. Episodes vary in length between 40 and 89 minutes and can be watched in any order. Actors rarely appear in more than one episode, though many installments make small references known as "Easter eggs" to previous episodes, such as through in-universe news channels and briefly-seen text. In 2025, the episode "USS Callister" received a sequel episode titled "USS Callister : Into Infinity", marking it as the first Black Mirror story to receive a continuation. The first two series comprised three episodes each and ran on Channel 4 in December 2011 and February 2013. After discussions for a third series fell through, a special entitled "White Christmas" was commissioned and aired in December 2014. The following year, Netflix commissioned twelve episodes, later splitting this into two series of six episodes that were released on 21 October 2016 and 29 December 2017. The interactive film Bandersnatch was spun out from the fifth series due to its complexity, debuting on 28 December 2018, and the delayed fifth series of three episodes premiered on 5 June 2019. The sixth series was released on 15 June 2023 and consists of five episodes. A seventh series was announced in November 2023, and was released on 10 April 2025. Episodes are usually dystopian, often with unhappy endings, and many are set in a futuristic world with advanced technology. The instalments have spanned a variety of genres including drama, psychological horror, political satire, and romantic comedy. Black Mirror has been met with positive reception from critics and has received numerous awards and nominations, including three consecutive wins of the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Television Movie.
The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of movies, music, video games, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection among users of the peer-to-peer torrent protocol, which are able to contribute to the site through the addition of magnet links. The Pirate Bay has consistently ranked as one of the most visited torrent websites in the world. Over the years the website has faced several server raids, shutdowns and domain seizures, switching to a series of new web addresses to continue operating. In multiple countries, Internet service providers (ISPs) have been ordered to block access to it. Subsequently, proxy websites have emerged to circumvent the blocks. In April 2009, the website's founders Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm were found guilty in the Pirate Bay trial in Sweden for assisting in copyright infringement and were sentenced to serve one year in prison and pay a fine. They were all released by 2015 after serving shortened sentences. The Pirate Bay has sparked controversies and discussion about legal aspects of file sharing, copyright, and civil liberties and has become a platform for political initiatives against established intellectual property laws as well as a central figure in an anti-copyright movement.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
