Yesterday, some of the biggest textbook publishers sued Library Genesis, an illegal shadow library that publishers accused of “extensive violations of federal copyright law.”

Publishers suing include Cengage Learning, Macmillan Learning, McGraw Hill, and Pearson Education. They claimed that Library Genesis (aka Libgen) is operated by unknown individuals based outside the United States, who know that the shadow library is “one of the largest, most notorious, and far-reaching infringement operations in the world” and intentionally violate copyright laws with “absolutely no legal justification for what they do.”

According to publishers, Libgen offers free downloads for over 20,000 books that the publishers never authorized Libgen to distribute. They claimed that Libgen is “a massive piracy effort” and noted that their complaint may be updated if more infringed works are found. This vast infringement is causing publishers and authors serious financial and creative harm, publishers alleged.

“The Libgen sites deprive plaintiffs and their authors of income from their creative works, devalue the textbook market and plaintiffs’ works, and may cause plaintiffs to cease publishing certain works,” the complaint said.

This is not the first lawsuit to go after Libgen, and if history repeats, it likely won’t be the last. TorrentFreak reported that after the publisher Elsevier sued Libgen in 2015, a court ordered Libgen to shut down. But after briefly disappearing, Libgen popped back up and has been online ever since, operating in defiance of that order—as well as court orders “in several countries, including Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom,” publishers’ complaint filed yesterday said. Those countries even tried ordering “Internet service providers to block access to Libgen Sites as a result of infringement actions,” publishers said, all seemingly to no avail.

It’s hard to say if the new lawsuit will have better luck forcing Libgen offline. Publishers have asked a US district court in New York to order Libgen to pay damages that TorrentFreak estimated could exceed $30 million. They also want an order blocking Libgen from any future or ongoing infringement, an accounting and disgorgement of Libgen’s profits, the destruction of all Libgen’s copies of infringed works, and an order forcing all of Libgen’s domain names to either be transferred to publishers or deleted.

Anonymity is key to Libgen’s success

According to Similarweb data cited in the complaint, Libgen attracted “an average of over 9 million visitors per month from the United States” from March through May 2023. This includes tons of students whom publishers claimed are “bombarded with messages to use Libgen sites” on social media rather than paying full price for textbooks. This, publishers claimed, devalues the textbook market and caused a “substantial decline in revenue from sales.”

Instead of paying publishers to distribute books like a real library does, the complaint alleged, Libgen profits off pirated works by running advertisements alongside e-book downloads for things like online games and browser extensions. Sometimes Libgen’s ads, publishers claimed, “appear to be phishing attempts, which can result in users downloading a virus or other malicious program onto their computers.” Libgen also fields donations from users, reporting that it has raised $182,540 so far in 2023, the complaint noted.

Publishers said the key to Libgen’s success as a pirate website is its carefully guarded anonymity. Libgen staff, the publishers alleged, hide behind usernames like “librarian” or “bookwarrior” and rely “on proxy services that specifically conceal website operators’ identifying information.” As a business, Libgen never provides names or addresses as contact information, and when they register for new domains, they use registrars that “keep registrant information private and/or registrant proxy services.”

So far, they’ve proven seemingly impossible to unmask, but Libgen’s operators “are believed to reside outside of the United States at unknown foreign locations,” the complaint said. But while Libgen staff remains anonymous, publishers know that they also “rely on US companies as intermediaries to operate the sites,” and those companies could help disable the operation. Those companies include Cloudflare, Protocol Labs, Namecheap, and Google, which publishers claimed help to enable Libgen’s file-sharing, proxy services, domain registrations, and search engine services.

Thanks in part to these US companies, Libgen operators can “rely on the anonymity of the Internet and their overseas locations to hide their names and addresses and frustrate enforcement efforts against them,” publishers alleged.

Publishers hope their lawsuit will finally end years of Libgen’s alleged mass copyright infringement, but shadow libraries like Libgen have proven resilient through multiple attacks from the highest levels of US law enforcement. Even when the US government arrested operators of another shadow library called Z-Library last year, Z-Library returned a few months later and found a way to continue operating after the US seized its login domain.

Ars could not immediately reach publishers’ lawyers or Libgen for comment.

BATON ROUGE, LA — In the most successful advancement for men’s mental health in decades, therapists opened an office that is simply an MMA octagon with a sign outside saying “Therapy”.

“My cracked rib is all healed so I’m off to therapy again honey,” said local man Deron Thompson to his wife. “Ready to get back in there and, uh, really work through my issues.”

Dr. Tim Dillashaw and Dr. Domingo Cruz said the new office is already bursting with patients after opening the new office just last month. “It’s not that men won’t do therapy, it’s just that no one has been offering actual therapy for men,” said Dr. Cruz. “You don’t need to lay on a couch. You need to lay on the mat while your opponent is throwing haymakers in full mount and learn how to fight your way back to your feet. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a patient to choke out.”

According to sources, the incognito MMA studio has produced stunning therapeutic results. “All of that stress from work suddenly didn’t matter so much when I was losing oxygen from an arm triangle,” said local patient Timothy Traeger. “I got absolutely pummeled during my first session and walked away feeling more alive than I’d felt in months. I tried and failed a million stress management techniques. Turns out, all I needed was to learn how to pass guard and make my buddy tap with an armbar.”

At publishing time, patients’ wives had reported tremendous satisfaction in their husbands’ new willingness to attend therapy, though they did express concern over why their husbands always returned from therapy limping.

In Disney’s upcoming reboot of 1937’s Snow White, will the Prince kiss the sleeping princess? Or will he obtain her consent first?

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more tactical instruction

Table of contents:

How should you organize your Laravel app to best serve your needs? Well, the good news is that you don’t have to worry about this since you are using a framework! Stick to the defaults unless you have good and objective reasons to do otherwise.

And yet, people can’t stop overthinking the architecture of their projects.

To me, it seems that the urge to deviate from the standard project structure often reveals a deeper issue – a fundamental inability to maintain organization. Whether you adhere to the Laravel architecture or significantly modify it, the outcome is likely to be disorganized.

Therefore, to address this problem, we will put ourselves in shoes that would fit almost any enterprise project.

Before we begin, though, let’s define what an “enterprise project” is in our context. Essentially, it’s a public facing project with lots of users that generates revenue, making it vital to continuously evolve by adapting to new technologies, business requirements, and market trends.

Here’s what is expected from the team of such projects:

1. Easy collaboration.
2. Maximize compatibility with third-party solutions that will help maintain the cost of development down.
3. Keep the cost of onboarding low. To achieve this, new hires need to easily find their way around the codebase, which can make them somewhat productive even when they lack domain knowledge.

With these goals in mind, let’s dive into what I, and most of the experts from the community, think are the best architecture practices.

Using Laravel is meant to make your life easier, not harder.

1. First, following conventions helps ensure that new hires can quickly find everything they need and start being productive as soon as possible. Laravel is a popular framework, and most developers will already be familiar with its default folder structure. By sticking to this, you help minimize the learning curve for new team members.
2. Also, a profitable project is supposed to last for many years. People come and go. You will likely move on to something else. Why wouldn’t you make it easy for the ones who will take over?
3. Additionally, by following the framework’s defaults, you ensure compatibility with many first and third-party packages. This can be crucial for maintaining development costs down and maximizing the use of available resources.

While it’s essential to keep the default folder structure, it’s also necessary to organize your code in a way that makes sense for your project. One way to do this is by organizing it by domain, without breaking the default folder structure.

This means that, for example, inside your Models folder, you could create a Blog folder. This way, when using the php artisan make:model Blog/Category command, the new file will be created at the right place.

This approach can also be used for controllers, middlewares, policies, and so on. Organizing your code the intended way will help you maintain a compatible, clean and intuitive codebase.

Developers love discovering new ways of doing things, and it’s always tempting to experiment with new packages or approaches. This is fine for personal projects or when you are working alone, but it may not be ideal in a team setting.

When you hire Laravel developers, you are hiring them to expand and maintain your product using Laravel. It’s essential to remember this and stick to the built-in features of Laravel whenever possible.

For example, don’t use Data Transfer Objects (DTOs) instead of custom form requests unless there are good and objective reasons to do so. Using the built-in features of Laravel ensures that all developers on your team are working with the same set of tools and reduces the learning curve for new hires.

Matt Stauffer, who has a lot of experience building apps for enterprise as the CEO of Tighten, talks about how keeping things simple benefits big projects.

James Brooks is a core Laravel team member. He knows what working with a big team and a big codebase are. He also asked me to include it in this article, so there he is!

https://twitter.com/jbrooksuk/status/1697182125663945015?s=20

Sebastian Schlein is the co-founder of BeyondCo, a company deeply involved with Laravel, and he also thinks that you should stick to the framework’s defaults. This is a tweet from 2019 by the way.

https://twitter.com/seb_sebsn/status/1186228940555345921

Jason McCreary, from Laravel Shift, also showcases his favorite way of organizing Laravel projects. Looks familiar, don’t you think?

https://twitter.com/gonedark/status/1333474208123412488

All that being said, at the end, results matter the most. Here’s a tweet from Taylor Otwell himself about keeping an open mind:

https://twitter.com/taylorotwell/status/1668580181504606208