SAN JOSE, Calif. (CN) — Sasha didn’t pirate textbooks before she attended San Jose State University. She didn’t even know how to. Then a classmate gave her a Google Drive link to a PDF of a textbook she needed, albeit a few editions out of date.
Asked how many classmates at San Jose State University also pirated course materials, she didn’t skip a beat.
“Oh, all of them,” she replied. “Everyone I know pirates textbooks.”
Since that fateful Google Drive link, the 22-year-old art student has pirated textbooks every semester, trawling through shady websites to save money.
She doesn’t see a problem with it. “I’m working endless nights. I’m doing homework and pulling all-nighters,” she said in an interview. “I’m paying so much — I’m doing so much — just to be in college. After all that, textbooks should be one of those things that are free.”
Sasha’s name, like those of other students in this story, has been changed so that they can speak freely about online piracy without possible legal or academic consequences.
According to data from the university’s Financial Aid and Scholarship Office, the average undergraduate SJSU student spends $1,062 on books and supplies. Coupled with other costs like tuition and room and board, the average on-campus student could expect to pay almost $35,000 per year.
Sasha pays roughly $17,000 a year — well below the average cost, but still a steep price tag. In her mind, she’s doing what’s necessary for her education.
“Like, come on, man. Throw me a bone and let me learn,” she complained.
Now, after a lawsuit against a major piracy site, procuring free textbooks could get harder for students like Sasha. Last year, four of the largest textbook publishers in the United States — Cengage, MacMillan, McGraw Hill and Pearson — collectively sued the website Library Genesis for copyright infringement.
Often shortened to LibGen, the site hosts around 4.6 million books and over 80 million science magazine articles, providing free access to academic materials that might otherwise require payment. According to the suing publishers, the collection includes around 20,000 textbooks on which they own copyrights.
In their lawsuit, filed in New York last September, they accused the site of operating “in complete and knowing defiance of the rule of law.”
In September, a federal judge in New York agreed. She ruled in favor of the companies, levying a $30 million fine against the website.
Still, it remains to be seen how much the judgment will change the status quo. Desperate to offset the skyrocketing costs of higher education, students like Sasha will likely keep searching online for free course materials. The lawsuit might not even completely stop LibGen, which uses a decentralized network and mirror websites to keep the proverbial pirate ship afloat.
Depending on who you ask, sites like LibGen are either copyright-infringing criminals or academic Robin Hoods, disseminating research that should have been freely available in the first place.
Whatever the case, it’s unclear if the New York court judgment will completely stop LibGen. Authorities don’t know who runs the site, and it operates a variety of mirror websites to stay online. Every time authorities take down one LibGen URL, another is there to replace it.
It’s a saga that captures the whack-a-mole game of stopping online piracy. Like LibGen, many online piracy libraries operate a variety of URLs, keeping them online even if one or several are shut down.
It also illustrates changing public attitudes on copyright infringement — a pastime as old as the internet itself.
Sasha is just one of a growing number of people who don’t care if the media they consume is stolen or not. According to a 2011 survey, 70% of the public consider piracy socially and ethically acceptable. And while that survey was conducted in Denmark, it points to changing norms around copyrighted content in the internet age.
“We’d like to believe that stealing is always wrong,” said Mark, an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. “But nobody really lives that way, even if we’d like to believe we do.”
In a phone interview, Mark said he’d been pirating textbooks for years, including from LibGen. To him, pricey textbooks are part of an unjust system forced on students — one he doesn’t mind cheating. He noted that publishers could make just a handful of superficial changes to a textbook, then release it as an expensive new edition.
“Nobody’s out here reading textbooks for pleasure,” he said. “They’re reading [them] because they’re mandated to.”
For Professor Abigail DeKosnik, who studies online piracy at the University of California, Berkeley, the LibGen case mirrors earlier battles over internet copyright infringement.
“This is exactly where the music piracy wars ended up in the early 2000s,” she said.
In the earlier days of the internet, music companies sought steep judgments against people (often teenagers) who stole songs through programs like Napster. In one of the last such cases, from 2012, a Minnesota woman was fined $220,000 for pirating 24 songs.
“There was outcry” over that strategy, DeKosnik said — and many big publishers and media companies adjusted how they tackled piracy. They “figured out ‘Oh, we’d better go after the platforms themselves rather than individual customers.’”
But while suing the pirate sites themselves might be more palatable to the public, it can also be equally ineffective.
Take LibGen as an example. Instead of keeping files in a central server, they’re stored across thousands of users’ computers through a decentralized network known as an InterPlanetary File System. That makes the website harder to pin down, since no one person has the keys to the kingdom.
This isn’t the first time a textbook company has sued LibGen seeking millions in damages. In past cases, the site owners haven’t shown up in court, have faced default judgment and then have gone about their business as usual.
The suing textbook publishers tried a different tack this time, seeking a broad injunction requiring third-party services like advertising networks and hosting providers to restrict access to the site. Parties who refuse to comply could face penalties, including fines and jail time.
Although the approach is unlikely to recover damages, it could disrupt operations at LibGen, said Rebecca Tushnet, a professor of law at Harvard Law School.
“The scope of the injunction is much broader and more likely to be honored by entities that might otherwise have provided services to the site,” Tushnet told Courthouse News in an interview. And so far at least, the strategy seems to be working: Of the 19 LibGen mirror sites named in the lawsuit, only eight are still accessible.
Michele Murphy, a partner at the intellectual property firm Oppenheim + Zebrak, represented the publishers in the LibGen case.
“We certainly hope that this ends up being the end of LibGen,” Murphy said in an interview.
But even if it isn’t, Murphy said the lawsuit still sends a clear message that copyright infringement won’t be tolerated, even for educational materials. “If anyone had any doubt before whether LibGen was an illegal site, the fact that it is illegal has now been confirmed by this court with 100% clarity,” she said.
Murphy doesn’t believe the $30 million fine leveled against LibGen makes up for the damage the site has done. Although it can be hard to quantify piracy — websites like LibGen don’t publish site statistics — college textbook sales are down 35% since 2013, according to figures from the company WordsRated.
“Just looking at their large collection of infringing works, we know that the loss to the plaintiffs in the case and other publishers is massive,” Murphy said.
For students struggling to afford textbooks, Murphy brought up the plethora of alternatives. Those include textbook-rental programs and online textbook portals.
To her, the lesson is clear. “No one should be downloading books from LibGen,” she said, “and no business should be knowingly assisting LibGen.”
Tell that to students like Sasha, who are on the frontlines of rising higher-education costs. After all, while services like textbook-rental services might be cheaper than buying course materials outright, they’re hardly free.
For her part, Sasha says she’d be happy to pay for textbooks if it was easier or less expensive — but she doubts the prices will change. More likely, tuition will increase again next year, and she’ll keep pirating her textbooks. “I don’t want to get in trouble for anything,” she said, “but at the same time, it’s really hard to get the textbooks you need on a budget.”