Copyright's Costs
Our copyright system has massive inefficiencies.
This piece will look at: the challenges that the authorities face in trying to get rid of shadow libraries; our copyright system’s massive inefficiencies; responses to the shadow libraries; and how much harm piracy does.
I don’t know how many readers are familiar with shadow libraries—perhaps some readers have read about Z-Library. The point is that a remarkably vast number of copyrighted publications are easily accessibly for free online. A 4 November 2022 piece says: pretty “much every book ever written is available online for free”; “millions are shared through central hubs, commonly known as ‘shadow libraries’”; “Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet”; “the site offers over 11 million books and 84 million articles”; and the site “has attracted a steady userbase and many millions of monthly visitors”.
The authorities recently brought the hammer down on Z-Library. A 17 November 2022 piece says: with “nearly 12 million books, Z-Library advertised itself as the largest repositories of pirated books on the Internet”; the “site had millions of regular readers who found a wealth of free knowledge and entertainment at their fingertips”; this “reign ended abruptly two weeks ago when the U.S. Department of Justice seized its domain names as part of a criminal investigation”; and the “two alleged masterminds have been arrested and will be prosecuted”. And a 26 November 2022 piece says that “the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed the indictment and complaint against two alleged operators of Z-Library”.
A Hopeless Effort
I personally don’t think that the authorities can stop the shadow libraries—I think that it’s a hopeless effort. People can—as far as I know—still use Z-Library itself on Tor and on I2P. And this seems like an unwinnable game of Whac-a-Mole—you can easily and quickly put a website up, whereas it takes a long time for the authorities to take one down. My understanding is that taking a website down doesn’t actually harm, hinder, or affect the underlying machinery behind that website—a replacement website can therefore rapidly spring up because the operation is still intact and was never damaged in any way.
Anna’s Archive is active on the normal internet—no need for Tor—and has an “About” page that says: “This website was created by Anna, the person behind the Pirate Library Mirror, which is a backup of the Z-Library shadow library.” And I estimate that people with 300 terabytes of disk space have the ability to personally mirror the totality of the shadow-library material that exists—maybe that’s irrelevant, but the fact that people can personally mirror the totality of the content in question might make it harder to crack down on shadow libraries.
It’s true that the authorities actually arrested two people associated with Z-Library, but a 23 November 2022 piece says that those two Z-Library people “made things easier for the FBI” and seemingly failed to make “the slightest efforts to conceal their identity online or to cover their tracks”—in sharp contrast, “Anna stated in an interview with Torrent Freak they are doing all they can to conceal their identity or to prevent leaving any trace while incorporating operational security of the highest order”.
A 30 November 2022 Vice piece refers to “‘shadow archivists’” who “maintain online repositories like LibGen and Z-Library, which host massive collections of pirated books, research papers, and other text-based materials”—the piece says that “maintaining a shadow library is time-consuming and often isolating for the librarian or archivist” and that it “makes perfect sense why a shadow librarian involved in this work for years may throw in the towel”. But the piece concludes with the comment that “as long as shadow librarians and archivists disagree with current copyright and institutional knowledge preservation practices, there will be shadow information specialists”. And with comments from Anna: shadow “‘library volunteers come and go, but the important part is that the content (books, papers, etc) is public, and mirrored far and wide’”; as “‘long as the content is widely available, new people can come in and keep the flame burning, and even innovate and improve’”; “‘it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle’” once “‘the content is out there’”; at “‘a minimum, we have to make sure that the content stays mirrored, because if that flame dies, it’s gone’”; and it’s “‘relatively easy’” to ensure that the content remains mirrored.
Massive Inefficiencies
Dean Baker has fascinating things to say about patents and copyrights—everyone should check out Chapter 5 of Baker’s free 2016 book Rigged:
Baker writes—in Chapter 5—that there are “solid grounds for questioning the extent to which patent and copyright protection are efficient mechanisms for supporting innovation and creative work”. The “justification for granting these monopoly protections is that the increased innovation and creative work that is produced as a result of these incentives exceeds the economic costs from patent and copyright monopolies”, but there’s “remarkably little evidence to support this assumption”—“the cost of patent and copyright protection in higher prices is apparent” and yet there’s “little evidence of a substantial payoff in the form of a more rapid pace of innovation or more and better creative work”. We have—“over the last four decades”—strengthened patents and copyrights based on the “explicit assumption” that the “increased incentive for innovation and creative work” would more than offset the higher prices. He cites the 2011 review “Economic Effects of Copyright” from Christian Handke. And says that Handke “notes that the evidence with copyrights, like the evidence with patents, is ambiguous as to whether they are a net economic positive”.
Baker observes: “there are clearly substantial costs associated with copyright protection”; these costs “have increased substantially as a result of digital technology”; and the “response of the U.S. government has been to promote stronger and more punitive laws and to require third parties to share in enforcement costs”. It “becomes more costly and difficult” to enforce copyright as “technology increases the ease of reproducing and transferring copyrighted material”. You “inevitably impose greater costs on society” when you try—despite technological change—to maintain copyright enforcement.
He points out that we have—in order to protect the entertainment industry’s business model—passed laws to contain digital technologies and the internet. But technological “change has destroyed many sectors of the economy”—the “spread of digital cameras essentially destroyed the traditional film industry, causing the collapse of two major U.S. corporations, Kodak and Polaroid, and leading to the loss of tens of thousands of jobs”. Nobody “would have considered it a reasonable strategy to block the spread of digital cameras”.
Baker outlines—as an alternative to the copyright system—a tax-credit system that would support creative work. The “goal of the creative work tax credit is to make a large amount of material available to the public that can be transferred at zero cost”—putting “more material in the public domain in different areas is a positive benefit, as long as people value this work”.
He also looks at the “striking” arithmetic of publicly financed textbooks—textbooks “are an enormous expense for college students”. Households “are on a path to spend more than $10.5 billion on them in 2016, or $500 per student”—the “figure is even higher for full-time students”.
Public “funding could produce a large number of textbooks free from copyright restrictions”—an “appropriation of $500 million a year (0.01 percent of federal spending) to finance textbook writing and production would cover 500 books a year, assuming an annual cost of $1 million per textbook”. After “10 years, 5,000 textbooks would be available in the public domain to be downloaded at zero cost, or printed out in hard copy for the cost of the paper”. This system would offer “enormous cost savings to students”; would offer “more flexibility to professors, who could combine chapters from different textbooks without the need for time-consuming and costly permission requests”; and would make it much simpler to update textbooks, since there’d be “no need to have a complete new edition to add one or two additional topics”. Anyone “could still produce textbooks under the copyright system”, so copyrighted textbooks would compete with publicly financed ones—few professors would use a publicly financed textbook if it was low-quality, so there’d be “a clear market test of the quality of the publicly financed work”.
Baker says that switching to “alternative mechanisms to patents and copyrights for supporting innovation and creative work” could “lead to substantial savings for households and businesses”—he shows speculative calculations in this table:
You can see $15.4 billion in potential savings for “Recorded music and video material”, $7.4 billion for “Educational books”, and $15.1 billion for “Recreational books”.
The “total potential savings are $435 billion, or 2.4 percent of GDP”—Baker concludes that there’s “little reason to believe that the gain from the innovation and creative work that is induced by these forms of protection is remotely comparable to the costs, especially when considering the potential benefits of alternative mechanisms for providing incentives”.
And Baker comments that the “prospect of having fully open research, where the incentive is for dissemination rather than secrecy, would almost certainly lead to more rapid progress than the current patent system”.
Responses to the Shadow Libraries
A 15 November 2022 Slate piece says that Z-Library’s shutdown “has left many students, particularly in the global south, scrambling for access to research and educational materials”. Z-Library was—for “a 21-year-old medical student in South Sudan”—“a crucial resource for accessing medical textbooks”. The student says that the books are “‘really expensive’”, that he doesn’t have any real access to public libraries from which to borrow”, and that the library can—even if the book is there—have “‘a ratio of 135 students to one book’”.
A PhD student says that she ‘“was heartbroken’” when she heard about the shutdown. She attends the National Institute of Advanced Studies—whose “parent organization is a world-class university”—but says that “not all books are available” in her “relatively well-funded university library”. A “single book can cost her half of her monthly salary—a price that seems particularly unreasonable when she needs to read only one chapter”. She says that she and other PhD students “‘are just on our stipends’”.
Khaled Faisal is a Bangladesh University of Professionals PhD student who “feels platforms like Z-library bridge the knowledge gap between the global north and the global south”—students “in the global north often have access to academic papers through their institutions”, but “institutions in developing nations often can’t afford the cost”. The “average cost of a journal article is around $30”. And additionally, academics and students have to “shell out money before even knowing if they really need access to the paper at all”—“it can be hard to know from reading just the abstract (a summary of a paper that is available for free) if the study will be relevant to your work”.
Faisal “uses Z-library to help him access research articles that are behind a paywall without subscribing to all journals he might need papers from”—he’s a lecturer too and says that his “‘students need resources’”. He “acknowledges that pirated book websites like Z-library undoubtedly hurt book and journal publishers—and, of course, authors”. And says that publishers have a responsibility to “consider the impact of steep price tags”—publishers “‘really, really need to think that they need to make their work easily accessible and affordable’”.
A 17 November 2022 WaPo piece quotes an author—Nisha Sharma—who says that her “‘concern with Z-Library is the people who read free pirated fiction for entertainment when they have the ability to purchase fiction’”. She says that there’s “‘a completely separate argument’” regarding textbooks—textbooks are “‘part of a larger problem with the education system’”. And the piece also quotes a journalism student—Marena Herron—who says that you “‘have to understand that the majority of Z-Library users were just there for the textbooks’”.
The Authors Guild says—in its 11 October 2021 report to the Office of the US Trade Representative—that digital “book piracy is a major threat facing authors’ livelihoods today”. The report gives the following quote from Sarina Bowen: “‘Z-Library is killing us. A book we release in the morning is up on Z-Library by lunchtime.’” And the Authors Guild says—in its 2 June 2020 testimony to Congress—that there’s “a clear correlation between the growth in piracy and the decline in incomes of authors”. The testimony cites Imke Reimers’s 2016 study Can Private Copyright Protection Be Effective? and gives the following quote from the study: “‘While physical formats are not affected by piracy protection, closer substitutes for online piracy such as legally distributed ebooks see a mean differential protection-related increase in sales of at least 14 percent.’”
A 7 December 2022 Wellesley Times piece says: the “average college student will spend $1,200 a year on textbooks”; “textbook prices have on average increased around 1,000%” since the late ’70s; this increase is “incredibly concerning when coupled with the troubling trend of increasing costs to higher education overall”; Z-Library “offered millions of students accessible materials and alleviated a financial burden”; and Z-Library “was never going to be a permanent solution to the problem”.
A 16 November 2022 Voice of America piece quotes Dave Hansen—the executive director of Authors Alliance—who refers to “‘how broken our copyright system is’”. Hansen notes that “the site hosted millions of scientific research articles, many of them taxpayer-funded”. And he comments: “‘It’s sad that for so many years, the issue of access to that research has been deemed too intractable to solve, leaving millions of people around the world who are desperate to learn and build upon that research out in the cold or dependent on sites like Z-Library.’”
And Joe Karaganis says in the 2018 book Shadow Libraries, which he edited: devices “remain poor substitutes for books in many situations and print is heavily favored over screen reading across all of the student groups (to the point where students routinely print out materials they have downloaded”; this “marks our study as a transitional one, catching the moment of widespread digitization of materials and related infrastructure but not yet the digitization of the wider teaching, learning, and research ecosystem, and not the stabilization of legal models and frameworks that can keep pace with the growth of higher education and the global scale of emerging knowledge communities”; the “democratization of access to higher education is a stunning if also complicated and still-evolving achievement”; the “democratization of access to the written products of that achievement is incomplete and passes, in middle- and low-income countries, through mostly informal channels”; “this informal copy culture is shaped by high prices, low incomes, and cheap technology—and only in very limited ways by copyright enforcement”; “shadow libraries, large and small, will remain powerful facts of educational life” as long as “the Internet remains ‘open’ in the sense of affording privacy and anonymity”; “the language of crisis serves this discussion poorly”; this “is an era of radical abundance of scholarship, instructional materials, and educational opportunity”; and the “rest is politics”.
How Much Harm Does Piracy Do?
There are challenges to the picture that the Authors Guild presents. Piracy will presumably reduce book sales to at least some extent—the issue then is how much, but apparently it’s hard to interpret the data. Take a look at these studies:
The first study says: the results do not—in general—“show robust statistical evidence of displacement of sales by online copyright infringements”; this “does not necessarily mean that piracy has no effect but only that the statistical analysis does not prove with sufficient reliability that there is an effect”; and an “exception is the displacement of recent top films”.
The second says: a “majority of the academic literature on the matter finds a negative net effect of illegal consumption on legal sales”; “a meta-analysis of the literature finds the evidence insufficient to conclude with certainty that piracy harms legal sales”; “there are several opposing interactions between piracy and legal consumption, some of which have a negative impact on sales, some positive and some neutral”; and the “relative strength of these interactions is likely to differ between content types and channels”. The study observes the following about those who consume content from illegal sources: “for each content type and country, 95% or more of pirates also consume content legally and their median legal consumption is typically twice that of non-pirating legal users”.
The third “confirms earlier studies in finding statistical evidence that illegal consumption of music, books and games displaces legal consumption”, though “the displacement coefficients are surrounded with substantial uncertainty”. The study observes that book pirates are—compared to the general survey population—more likely to buy ebooks and audiobooks and print books, borrow ebooks and audiobooks and print books, and own library cards.
And you can imagine a scenario where publishers’ revenues decreased drastically due to piracy—publishers would then have to turn to alternative funding models or else go out of business. The assumptions are that piracy really does reduce revenues and really could pose this existential threat, but there is—arguably—no alternative that would keep publishers alive if the copyright model no longer could. We all lose if publishing dries up.
Noam Chomsky says at a 19 March 2013 event: making the journals’ content freely accessible means that “the journals go out of business and nobody has anywhere to publish”; “there are ways around this, but the ways around it involve collective action”; and “there ought to be a public subsidy for creative work”. There would be “incredible savings” under a public system—“everything would be open”.
Many thanks. Helps to understand the situation after Z-libs troubles. Anna's Archives is great.
Excellent objective overview.