I dont know if this is asked or not, so please don’t burn me for asking. I stumbled upon Annas Archieve today and was amazed at it, as well as what I could use it for.
I was just curious as I am familiar with sites like PirateBay, etc. that you need a torrent reader as well as a VPN spoof in order to protect yourself from the eyes of law. Is it needed here in order to protect oneself, or because the files are so small that it is not needed?
Appreciate any responses in advance!
generally speaking, anti-‘piracy’ police action is aimed at distributors (people who share stuff) far more than consumers. so far this has been pretty true for ebooks, so your likely risk is relatively low
that being said:
File size has no impact upon legality.
If you fear youre at risk for downloading a 300kb epub, go ahead do whatever. If you think there is no possible way that law enforcement are chasing downloaders of pirated books, then keep doing that.
Ive been downloading ebooks from annas for a while and i run no vpn for them but other stuff yes, especially torrents
You’re asking a question about the law but we don’t even know what country you’re in. That said, the main function of VPNs when it comes to book piracy is to circumvent blocking measures. In most countries, nobody is going to chase you for downloading some books.
The problem is, torrents work by you uploading while you download. So they could get a search warrant based on internet intelligence, they do monitor trackers, they can seize your hard drives and computers. Maybe in about a year you might get them back. But not if they find any traces of the files \ with or without torrents, they can potentially charge you for distributing, even if you only downloaded. Because as I said torrents upload by default. Should you use a vpn? Yes.
I don’t have space to download it but the project seemed interesting. But my view is that because those zlibrary russians were arrested, them making the site public was a huge insult to those police. They have to be aware, and they have to be monitoring it. If your IP gets tracked, I’d give you 4 to 6 months before your door gets knocked in at 5am. They don’t care about ethics, lets say you wanted to archive the data for preservation purposes, they would instead think you are going to set up a new zlibrary. So e.g. to them every potential seeder is another risk of the site coming back.
Appreciate the response. Great points. I had a roommate that used pirate bay to download something and our internet company sent us a letter about it. Just didn’t know if there was as big of a chance of that happening!
If you just download books from our site, you’re not uploading (like you are with torrents), so pretty unlikely to get such a letter. However, like n0noTAGAinnxw4Yn3wp7 said, it doesn’t hurt to use a VPN, but I wouldn’t say it’s super necessary.
Appreciate the response! Good to know, thank you!