The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has no information about the blocking of Library Genesis (LibGen), it says in response to a MediaNama RTI. This comes after multiple reports of LibGen being one of the shadow library services that the Delhi High Court (HC) instructed the government to block.
These reports came in the context of the 2020 copyright lawsuit that publishing giants Elsevier, Wiley Periodicals (including its Indian division), and the American Chemical Society had filed against Sci-Hub and LibGen in the Delhi HC.
As per the court order from August 19, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had to send out blocking orders for Sci-Hub within 72 hours. The order, however, only mentioned SciHub.
The court specifically took this decision to block the site because Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan disregarded court restrictions that instructed her not to add the publishers’ content beyond 2022 on her site. Further, the court took note of the fact that Sci-Hub’s homepage acknowledges piracy.
What are shadow libraries?
Shadow libraries are free online repositories of information that are otherwise paywalled. In a previous conversation with MediaNama, Intellectual Property (IP) lawyer Rahul Ajatshatru explained that it would be inaccurate to classify these repositories as libraries.
“Ordinarily, a library is a place where published works are kept and offered to members (or the public in case of a public library) for accessing the works. The same principle applies to online libraries. Publishers/authors have to consent to the website to allow access to its members or visitors, as the case may be,” Ajatshatru had pointed out.
Despite how one may classify them, shadow libraries are often a useful resource for researchers. This is evident by the widespread pushback from the research community on the Sci-Hub blocking and also from the intervention application researchers had submitted to the Delhi HC in the 2020 court case.
Researchers had mentioned that if the court blocked Sci-Hub and LibGen, publicly funded academic institutions would face a serious burden because of the high costs of Elsevier’s books and journals. They also explained that any blocking order against the two shadow libraries would prevent them from conducting research: which goes against public interest.
Status of the shadow libraries:
As MediaNama noted in its story about SciHub, the website is still accessible in India on certain mirror links. While some of these links allow users to download books and research papers, others just tell you ways to access the article you look for without a download link.
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Similarly, despite MeitY saying that it has no information about a blocking order against LibGen, certain LibGen links are no longer accessible while others continue to work. Besides these two websites,…
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