Digitial dark age

It was a good ten year or so run for the internet but we've reached a point where with each piece of Hollywood-backed censorship legislation, with the birth of each new "app" or "cloud" based computing device, and with victories such as this one by big publishers we're abandoning the idea that knowledge, scholarship, the stuff of civilization itself should be available to anyone other than those with the means to purchase it.

But the legality of library.nu is also not the issue: trading in scanned, leaked or even properly purchased versions of digital books is thoroughly illegal. This is so much the case that it can't be long before reading a book - making an unauthorised copy in your brain - is also made illegal.

But library.nu shared books; it did not sell them. If it made any money, it was not from the texts themselves, but from advertising revenue. As with Napster in 1999, library.nu was facilitating discovery: the ability to search deeper and deeper into the musical or scholarly tastes fellow humans and to discover their connections that no recommendation algorithm will ever be able to make. In their effort to control this market, publishers alongside the movie and music industry have been effectively criminalising sharing, learning and creating - not stealing.