Little over a year ago, the U.S. Government attempted to shut down Z-Library. Two suspects were arrested and both risk lengthy prison sentences. While that could act as a deterrent, the shadow library remains online today. Hoping to make it less accessible, publishers are now turning to Google, which has received millions of takedown notices for the site’s domain names.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
With more than 14 million digital books in its archive, Z-Library is one of the largest shadow libraries on the Internet.
Two of its alleged operators were arrested as part of a criminal crackdown by the United States, but the site seems largely unaffected.
The Russian defendants are currently fighting an extradition battle. While their involvement with Z-Library is apparent to U.S. law enforcement, they don’t appear to be crucial to the operation, since Z-Library continues to thrive.
The feds are not standing idly by and have seized hundreds of domain names belonging to the site. This first happened in November 2022, shortly before the criminal case was made public. Last spring this was followed by another round, and a third wave came two months ago.
Despite these continued crackdowns, Z-Library doesn’t intend to throw the towel. Instead, it has relocated to new domains, of which there’s an infinite supply.
Helped by dedicated apps and browser extensions, many users manage to find their way back to the site. Popular search engines help too, as these typically return the site’s active domain in search results. However, publishers are actively trying to put a halt to that too.
Targeting Z-Library’s Google Results
Earlier this month, we already indicated that publishers are now responsible for the bulk of the DMCA takedown requests Google receives. These notices come in at a rate of millions per day.
Looking more closely at the data, we see that this recent surge in publisher activity is largely driven by Z-Library. This suggests that the publishers are trying to make sure that the shadow library is hard to find through the search engine.
While publishers have had to deal with piracy for many years, the Z-Library case seems to have struck a nerve. The takedown campaign isn’t just limited to a handful of publishers either. There is broad participation, including the names below which have all sent millions of takedowns.
Hachette, Penguin Random House, Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins Publishers, Taylor & Francis, Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, Editis, Madrigal, and Pearson Education.
Many Millions of URLs
Hachette, for example, targeted over 3 million domains during the first week of 2024, mostly targeting, Z-Library domains. This includes familiar including Z-Library.se, but also country-specific ones such as Ukrainian-books.se.
The publisher started sending takedowns around the time Z-Library was raided, and it reported more than 30 million URLs since.
Looking at all publishers’ requests, we see that Zlibrary-global.se and Zlibrary-asia.se were targeted most often. Both domains have more than 8 million URLs flagged as copyright-infringing. This happened in just a few months, with the first requests coming in June last year.
At the moment, Z-Library.se is promoted as Z-Library’s main domain. While it has only been active for a few weeks, rightsholders have already reported over 2 million of its URLs.
With a total of hundreds, if not thousands of Z-Library domain names, it’s easy to see how the number of reported URLs could easily exceed a hundred million.
This recent action is a clear departure from the relatively mild takedown action visible before the U.S. crackdown. At that time, the main Z-Library domains such as the now-seized z-lib.org and b-ok.org were flagged considerably less.
Effective?
The effectiveness of the Google-oriented takedown action remains to be seen. The search engine typically hides frequently targeted domains from search results, which indeed makes them harder to find.
That said, a search for Z-Library does return the Wikipedia entry in the top results, which provides information on how the site can be accessed.
In addition, go-to-zlibrary.se, which provides info on how to access the site, remains in the top results too. Since this domain doesn’t link to infringing material directly, it is harder to take down.
All in all, it is safe to conclude that the DMCA surge will make it less likely that people will accidentally stumble upon Z-Library through Google searches. However, those who are determined to access the site usually find a way.
From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.
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