File sharing

Practice of distributing or providing access to digitally stored information

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February 2025 Unsealed internal emails in a lawsuit against Meta revealed that the company had downloaded over 81 terabytes of data through Anna's Archive torrents.
January 2025 Telegram suspended Anna's Archive's channel and messaging app access due to copyright infringement, without prior warning. In the same week, Z-Library's Telegram channel was also suspended.
2024 Anna's Archive was again listed in the Notorious Markets List by the United States Trade Representative. The Association of American Publishers identified it as an infringing site and analyzed its cryptocurrency wallets, finding a total of $29,596.21 in received funds.
December 2024 Publishers successfully seized the 'library.lol' domain and took most Library Genesis domains offline.
December 2024 The majority of Library Genesis domains are seized or disabled through legal action by a group of publishers led by Pearson Education. The German consortium (CUII) also institutes a country-wide blocking order against Library Genesis without court authorization.
December 2024 The UK Publishers Association successfully obtained a High Court of Justice order requiring major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Anna's Archive and other copyright-infringing websites, as part of ongoing efforts to protect copyrighted materials under section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act.
September 2024
Tor
Tails, a security-focused operating system, was announced as becoming part of the Tor Project, expanding its network of privacy-oriented software platforms.
September 26 2024 A US judge ordered LibGen to pay the publishers US$30 million, despite uncertainty about who operates the platform.
July 2024 Following the OCLC lawsuit, Anna's Archive replaced its .org mirror with a .gs mirror to avoid US jurisdiction. Shortly after, the .gs domain was suspended, and the site reverted to the original .org domain.
March 2024 A group of authors filed a lawsuit against Nvidia in a California federal court, alleging that the company trained its NeMo AI platform using the Books3 dataset, which includes copyrighted data from Anna's Archive.
March 2024 The Rotterdam District Court issued a blocking order against Anna's Archive and Library Genesis, requiring major internet service providers in the Netherlands to block these sites following a request by anti-piracy group BREIN. The order was 'dynamic', allowing for blocking of future domain or IP address changes.
March 23 2024 The Dutch pirate site blocklist added Library Genesis and Anna's Archive following a request by BREIN, a local anti-piracy group, further restricting the platform's availability.
March 1 2024 Publishers requested a default judgment and an injunction to compel gateway providers IPFS, Pinata Technologies, and Cloudflare to deny services to Library Genesis.
January 2024 Italy's national communications agency ordered Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block Anna's Archive following a copyright complaint by the Italian Publishers Association. The Digital Services Directorate investigated the site and confirmed the presence of copyrighted material, identifying that some servers were likely owned by a Ukrainian hosting provider.
January 2024 OCLC filed a lawsuit against Anna's Archive in an Ohio federal court, claiming the WorldCat scrape was achieved through cyberattacks and seeking over $5 million in damages and an injunction.
2023 Anna's Archive was first included in the Notorious Markets List by the United States Trade Representative, identifying the site as potentially engaging in large-scale copyright infringement.
October 2023 Anna's Archive scraped the entirety of WorldCat, the world's largest bibliographic database, making its proprietary data freely available. Anna described this as 'a major milestone in mapping out all the books in the world'.
September 14 2023 Pearson Education, McGraw Hill Education, Macmillan Publishers, and Cengage Group initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit against Library Genesis in the Southern District of New York.
2022
Tor
During the Mahsa Amini protests in Iran, Tor and Snowflake were used to circumvent rolling internet blackouts.
2022
Tor
Kaspersky researchers discovered malware disguised as Tor Browser on YouTube, specifically targeting Chinese-language users by saving browsing history and downloading malicious components based on the device's IP address.
2022
Tor
During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the BBC and VOA directed Russian audiences to Tor to circumvent internet censorship.
November 2022 Following US law enforcement's seizure of Z-Library domains and arrest of its alleged operators, Anna (Anna Archivist) launched Anna's Archive, initially displaying results from Z-Library and Library Genesis.
September 2022 Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) project successfully completed a full mirror copy of Z-Library, acknowledging deliberate copyright law violations in most countries.
July 21 2022
Tor
Russian courts reinstated the blockade on Tor's website after the temporary lifting in May.
May 24 2022
Tor
Russian courts temporarily lifted the blockade on Tor's website, requiring the Tor Project to be involved in the legal case.
2021 European Citizens' Initiative 'Freedom to Share' began collecting signatures to discuss file sharing regulations.
December 8 2021
Tor
The Russian government agency Roskomnadzor officially announced a ban on Tor and six VPN services for non-compliance with the Russian Internet blacklist. The Tor Project subsequently appealed the ban in Russian courts.
December 1 2021
Tor
Russian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) began unsuccessfully attempting to block Tor's main website and several Tor bridges.
2020 The Library Genesis project is forked under a new domain 'libgen.fun' due to internal project conflicts.
2020 The project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of content using IPFS, expanding Library Genesis and Sci-Hub's digital archiving capabilities.
2019 Archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to improve seeding and hosting of LibGen's data dumps, with project coordinator 'shrine' describing it as creating a 'permanent library card for the world'.
November 2019
Tor
Edward Snowden publicly called for a full, unabridged Chinese translation of his autobiography 'Permanent Record' after the Chinese publisher violated their agreement by removing mentions of Tor and other politically sensitive content.
November 2018 Library Genesis was blocked by Russian internet service providers, marking a significant legal challenge to the platform's accessibility in Russia.
October 2018
Tor
Chinese online communities within Tor began to decline due to increased government efforts to suppress them.
August 23 2018
Tor
The German court at Landgericht München ruled that the police raid on Zwiebelfreunde was illegal, with seized hardware and documentation kept under seal and reportedly not analyzed.
June 2018
Tor
Venezuela blocked access to the Tor network, affecting both direct connections and connections via bridge relays.
June 20 2018
Tor
Bavarian police raided the homes of board members of Zwiebelfreunde, a non-profit organization associated with Tor, in connection with a controversial blog post about the Alternative for Germany convention.
April 2018
Tor
The Tor Project shut down the Tor Messenger project due to discontinued support for Instantbird, limited resources, and known metadata problems, citing impossibility of addressing future vulnerabilities due to outdated software dependencies.
2017 European Commission published a paper 'Estimating displacement rates of copyrighted content in the EU', concluding that illegal online transactions can increase game sales.
August 2017
Tor
Cybersecurity firms specializing in dark web monitoring began routinely sharing their findings with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies regarding illegal content found on Tor-based networks.
July 2017
Tor
AlphaBay dark web marketplace, which relied on Tor and Bitcoin, was taken down in an international law enforcement operation due to operational security errors.
June 2017
Tor
The Democratic Socialists of America recommended intermittent Tor usage for politically active organizations and individuals as a defensive measure against information security threats.
2016
Tor
Tor developer Mike Perry announced a prototype tor-enabled smartphone based on CopperheadOS, called 'Mission Improbable', aimed at exploring Tor's mobile capabilities. The project was welcomed by Copperhead's lead developer Daniel Micay.
December 2016
Tor
Turkey blocked usage of Tor and ten major VPN services, which had been popular for accessing banned social media sites and services.
December 2 2016
Tor
The New Yorker reported on digital privacy and security workshops in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly at Noisebridge hackerspace, with Tor browser downloads gaining popularity in the wake of the US presidential election.
September 2016
Tor
The FBI was unable to locate, de-anonymize, or identify the Tor user who hacked into a staffer's email account on Hillary Clinton's email server.
May 16 2016
Tor
CNN reported on Tor core developer 'isis agora lovecruft' fleeing to Germany under threat of an FBI subpoena, with legal representation from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
March 2016
Tor
New Hampshire state representative Keith Ammon introduced a bill allowing public libraries to run privacy software, specifically referencing Tor. The bill was crafted with input from Alison Macrina of the Library Freedom Project and passed by the House 268-62.
March 2016
Tor
The first Tor middle relay node was established at the Graduate Resource Centre (GRC) in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada.
December 2015
Tor
Notable figures including Daniel Ellsberg, Cory Doctorow, Edward Snowden, and Molly Crabapple publicly announced their support for Tor.

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This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia articles Anna's Archive, Tor (network), File sharing & Library Genesis, which are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

See Also