Library Genesis

Since December 2024, LibGen has been targeted by US based Educational Publishers Pearson Education, alongside being placed on a ban list in Germany at request of multiple unnamed publishers. This legal action is leading to significant outages across the service. == History ==

The roots of Library Genesis lie in Russia, where the former Soviet Russia and Soviet Union underground book sharing culture known as samizdat arose to illegally get around the tight censorship. As access to printing in the Soviet Union was strictly controlled and censored, dissident intellectuals would hand-copy and retype illegal manuscripts for secret circulation. This was effectively legalized under Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, though the state monopoly on printed media remained. The volunteers moved into the Russian computer network ("RuNet") in the 1990s, which became awash with hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated contributions. Librarians became especially active, using borrowed access passwords to download copies of scientific and scholarly articles from Western Internet sources, then uploading them to RuNet. In the early 21st century, the efforts became coordinated, and integrated into one massive system known as Library Genesis, or LibGen, around 2008. It subsequently absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to, library.nu, which was shut down by legal action in 2012. By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of library.nu with 1.2 million records. In 2020, the project was forked under a different domain, "libgen.fun", due to internal conflict within the project. As a result, databases were maintained independently and as a consequence, the works available differed between libgen.fun and other LibGen domains. As of 2025, libgen.fun is no longer available, as the domain was seized. In mid-December 2024, as the majority of Library Genesis domains were seized or disabled through legal action from a group of publishers led by Pearson Education, the German consortium (CUII), composed of copyright holder groups and internet service providers, also instituted a country-wide blocking order against Library Genesis at the request of publishers whose names were redacted. The latter action was taken without court authorization; instead, the Federal Network Agency was consulted to clear the net neutrality requirements. == Legal issues ==

Litigation Elsevier lawsuit (2015) On June 3, 2015, Library Genesis (along with the creator of Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan) was sued by Elsevier, the academic division of the third-largest publishing group by worldwide revenue in 2014. Elsevier accused it of "operating an international network of piracy and copyright infringement" and granting free access to articles and books. In response, the admins accused Elsevier of gaining most of its profits from publicly funded research which should be freely available to all as they are paid for by taxpayers. As a result of Elsevier's lawsuit, in late October 2015 the District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered LibGen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org), but the site remained accessible through alternative domains. Pearson, McGraw Hill, Macmillan and Cengage lawsuit (2023–2024) On September 14, 2023, the educational publishers Pearson Education (the then third-largest publisher by global revenue), McGraw Hill Education, Macmillan Publishers and Cengage Group initiated a lawsuit for copyright infringement against Library Genesis before the District Court for the Southern District of New York. They claimed that the Library Genesis websites "deprive [them] and their authors of income from their creative works, devalue the textbook market and [their] works, and may cause [them] to cease publishing certain works". They demanded control or deletion of the Library Genesis domains and the seizure of its operators' alleged profits. On March 1, 2024, the publishers requested a default judgment and an injunction compelling the gateway providers IPFS, Pinata Technologies and Cloudflare to deny services to Library Genesis. On September 26, 2024, a US judge ordered LibGen to pay the publishers US$30 million, though the parties responsible for the site are unknown. In December 2024, the publishers succeeded in seizing the "library.lol" domain and taking most of the other Library Genesis domains offline. Blocks Some LibGen URLs are blocked by a number of ISPs in the United Kingdom, but such DNS-based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access. Germany, Greece, Italy, Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage), and Russia (in November 2018). On March 23, 2024, the Dutch pirate site blocklist has been reported to now include Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, based on a request by BREIN, a local anti-piracy group. Alleged AI training Meta AI Court documents unsealed in March 2025 suggested that Meta Platforms had used LibGen resources to train its generative language AI models. The documents were part of a class-action lawsuit filed against Meta by the novelists Richard Kadrey and Christopher Golden and comedian Sarah Silverman. Claude Court documents unsealed in June 2025 suggested that Anthropic reportedly used LibGen resources to train its generative language AI models. The documents were part of a separate class action-lawsuit filed against Anthropic by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. In September 2025, Anthropic reached a settlement for $1.5 billion for knowingly using data from pirated sources. Among other pirated sources, Anthropic reportedly used LibGen resources to obtain at least 5 million books to use as training material. == Usage ==

Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub, which provides free access to millions of research papers and books, relied on LibGen as storage. Papers requested by users were requested from LibGen and served from there if available, otherwise they were fetched by other means and then stored on LibGen. In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to better seed and host LibGen's data dumps. The project's spokesperson and coordinator 'shrine' described the effort as a way for a "permanent library card for the world" and reported that the response has been "overwhelmingly positive from everyone". In 2020, the project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of works from Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using IPFS. == See also ==