The Office's press release states:
As alleged in the indictment and court filings, Z-Library bills itself as "the world's largest library" and claims to offer more than 11 million e-books for download. Z-Library, which has been active since approximately 2009, offers e-book files in a variety of file formats, stripped of their copyright protections, and encourages users to upload and download titles. Many of the e-books offered by Z-Library are protected intellectual property for which authors hold copyrights and publishers hold exclusive distribution rights, and which Z-Library has no right or license to distribute, and which are available elsewhere only with anti-circumvention measures applied. As such, a central purpose of Z-Library is to allow users to download copyrighted books for free in violation of U.S. law. In addition to its homepage, Z-Library operates as a complex network of approximately 249 interrelated web domains. As part of this action, those domains were taken offline and seized by the U.S. government.
Like any other defendants, the defendants named in U.S. v. Napolsky and Ermakova are entitled to a presumption of innocence, and we can expect a future verdict based on the evidence. But what may safely be said at this point is that the trafficking of copyrighted works that is alleged in the complaint is precisely the type of criminal conduct that federal law enforcement ought to be targeting.
Free State Foundation President Randolph May and I address the topic of criminal copyright enforcement in our book, Modernizing Copyright Law for the Digital Age: Constitutional Foundations for Reform (2020).
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