Some of the most infamous so-called shadow libraries have increasingly faced legal pressure to either stop pirating books or risk being shut down or driven to the dark web. Among the biggest targets are Z-Library, which the US Department of Justice has
charged with criminal copyright infringement, and Library Genesis (Libgen), which was
sued by textbook publishers last fall for allegedly distributing digital copies of copyrighted works "on a massive scale in willful violation" of copyright laws.
But now these shadow libraries and others accused of spurning copyrights have seemingly found an unlikely defender in Nvidia, the AI chipmaker among those profiting most from the recent AI boom.
Nvidia seemed to defend the shadow libraries as a valid source of information online when responding to a
lawsuit from book authors over the list of data repositories that were scraped to create the Books3 dataset used to train Nvidia's AI platform NeMo.
That list includes some of the most "notorious" shadow libraries—Bibliotik, Z-Library (Z-Lib), Libgen, Sci-Hub, and Anna's Archive, authors argued. However, Nvidia hopes to invalidate authors' copyright claims partly by denying that any of these controversial websites should even be considered shadow libraries.
