lmao, the FBI is mad that the Z-Library founders are having holidays

you can check this yourself here: http://z-lib.org

I do not think these people are cybercriminals. They are the best we got to help information preservation (next to the Internet Archive) in the 21st century.

The fact they had to mention that these people are Russian also strikes me as odd. They don't even seem to be government affiliated, I'm pretty sure the FBI would've said so if there was even a slight hint of that.

While OpenAI can freely use all copyrighted material and make billions off of it, these people giving it out for free are supposed “criminals”. Aaron Schwartz didn't die for this.

@ErikUden I'd like to see how the main CEOs and shareholders of Wiley, hachette, Elsevier spend their money.

@antoinechambertloir the FBI really shows pictures of some dope ass nature or maybe hotel, but still proletarian holidays, and says “look at how luxuriously they spend their money!!” wtf...

All journals have higher profit margins than big tech companies. Their CEOs got super Yachts and shit. What is wrong with the FBI

@suqdiq yea

@ErikUden
why does it look like the "stop doing blank" meme???

@ErikUden

How they spend it, LLM companies are stealing your stuff.

Bezos, Zuck, Altman, Pichai

@lily @ErikUden STOP DOING HOLIDAYS

RUSSIANS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO HAVE FUN

Yeah right, don't give money to regular people having regular vacations while also helping make knowledge more accessible. Instead, give it to corporations that already have orders of magnitude more money than they know what to do with, and themselves contribute almost nothing of value to the society.

@ErikUden

> The fact they had to mention that these people are Russian also strikes me as odd.

Well, not really all that surprising to me.

You see, according to the newest popular consensus, all Russians are 100% evil always. Each and every one of us starts their day with eating a baby, and no afternoon is complete without torturing a kitten.

The mere fact of a person being born or existing within the borders of a certain country disqualifies them from being viewed as anything other than the enemy to the humanity as a whole.

All of this is absolutely logical, is based on indisputable facts and is not chauvinistic hatemongering whatsoever.

God forbid those mmmhhh-onsters make the knowledge available to all, and worse yet - have a good time while doing it, that'd be a disaster.

@ErikUden (all of this was sarcasm, by the way - just in case)

@ErikUden as a published scientist who receives zero revenue from any of the work I've published with for-profit academic journals, and not even that, had to pay for said publications with public funds (yes, this is how it works): Fuck publishing houses like Elsevier and the likes and I have absolutely no moral problem with how those supposed cybercriminals spend their money

Meta directly downloaded 80+ Terabytes of books from Z-Lib to train AI models, meaning they're allowing a public and illegal redistribution of the entirety of those works, and even paywalling most of it to make money off of these historic works.

Hey FBI, take down their page too?

@ErikUden fuck the global cops and their laws

@alsternerd of course for me too, if you know where to look :)

But the main one was taken down:
http://z-lib.org