Private Law Theory

INTRODUCTION
Shadow libraries are vast online repositories containing millions of pirated books and articles made free to download on websites. The sharing of copyrighted work outside ‘official channels’ has been identified as a longstanding practice, with scholars such as Bodó tracing the historic roots of key shadow libraries such as Library Genesis (‘LibGen’) and Sci-Hub to unauthorized photocopying in resistance to Soviet censorship and attempts by Russian academics in the 1990s to disseminate literature during economic crisis. The consolidation, however, of unauthorized copies of works into digital collections emerged in the early 2000s when technical developments enabled the ‘large scale automation’ of such activities. In the decades that followed the first digital library, Project Gutenberg, which provided public domain works on the predecessor to the internet, personal collections of digitized works grew into larger projects and became increasingly more susceptible to copyright infringement claims …

Michelle Rademeyer and Niloufer Selvadurai, Out from the shadows: developing effective copyright laws for AI training datasets and shadow libraries, Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice. Published: 24 November 2025.