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Library Genesis serves as an unofficial alternative to Internet Archive' Open Library, with no lending controls and copyright restrictions (as they operate outside of US jurisdiction and make no attempt to adhere to copyright law, similar to SciHub).

To your point, the Internet Archive most definitely needs to operate in a distributed, global fashion to prevent a single country from causing a loss of cultural data because of political winds or profits being put first. Mirror the whole thing on multiple continents.




Isn't SciHub just a rich "client" for LibGen?


SciHub is a web service that downloads papers on demand. In addition to serving the paper up, they also send a backup to LibGen, making LibGen's scientific paper section an archive of SciHub.


Implementation detail I gloss over for the audience.


Would you call Netflix a rich client for s3 though?

I think there is value in the destinction if it's only used as a storage backend, but actually gets the media through different sources.


No, I'd call Netflix a rich client for Netflix's OpenConnect appliance network.

To be clear, I have a deep appreciation for SciHub and LibGen, I just don't have the energy to dive in depth in this forum.


I thought the openconnect network was basically just a cache which tries to serve popular media directly from the providers?

They didn't have enough storage for their full library on the appliances previously. So that'd be like a caching proxy in front of the service

Maybe that changed with how tiny their library became over the years. (Edit:it didn't change. That's what it is.)




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