Book Piracy as Peer Preservation

"In describing the people, books, and technologies behind one of the largest “shadow” libraries in the world, we find a tension between the dynamics of sharing and preservation. The paper proceeds to contextualize contemporary book piracy historically, challenging accepted theories of peer production. Through a close analysis of one digital library’s system architecture, software and community, we assert that the activities cultivated by its members are closer to that of conservationists of the public libraries movement, with the goal of preserving rather than mass distributing their collected material. Unlike common peer production models emphasis is placed on the expertise of its members as digital preservations, as well as the absorption of digital repositories. Additionally, we highlight issues that arise from their particular form of distributed architecture and community.
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In parallel with the development of LNU/Gigapedia, a group of Russian enthusiasts were working on a meta-library of sorts, under the name of Aleph. Records of Aleph’s activity go back at least as far as 2009. Colloquially known as “prospectors,” the volunteer members of Aleph compiled library collections widely available on the gray market, with an emphasis on academic and technical literature in Russian and English.
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Where the latter relied on proprietary server applications, Aleph built software that enabled others to mirror and to serve the site in its entirety. The server was written by d* from www.l*.com (Bet), utilizing a codebase common to several similar large book-sharing communities. The initial organizational efforts happened on a sub-forum of a popular torrent tracker (RR). Fifteen founding members reached early consensus to start hashing document filenames (using the MD5 message-digest algorithm), rather than to store files as is, with their appropriate .pdf or .mobi extensions.33 Bit-wise hashing was likely chosen as a (computationally) cheap way to de-duplicate documents, since two identical files would hash into an identical string. Hashing the filenames was hoped to have the side-effect of discouraging direct (file system-level) browsing of the archive.34 Instead, the books were meant to be accessed through the front-end “librarian” interface, which added a layer of meta-data and search tools. In other words, the group went out of its way to distribute Aleph as a library and not merely as a large aggregation of raw files."


http://computationalculture.net/article/book-piracy-as-peer-preservation

http://piracylab.org/

http://lib.ru/