Recently, an interesting story occurred involving the pirate library Libgen. American judge Collin McMahon sided with book publishers and, following their complaint, ordered the resource to pay $30 million in compensation for violating so-called “copyrights” (privileges granted to a stationary bandit). However, enforcing this decision proved impossible – quite simply, no one knows who the actual creator and leader of this pirate library is. Furthermore, the judge’s ruling prohibits anyone from participating in the resource’s activities, such as providing data storage, registering domains, or even distributing links to it. However, the resource’s operation relies on the work of thousands of volunteers from all over the world who upload files and distribute torrents, so the resource has faced no problems other than the blocking of certain domain names.
This case contrasts sharply with the story of the creators of the Tornado Cash crypto mixer. They did not act anonymously, openly presenting themselves as the creators of the resource. And for this, they were subject to state prosecution. Even the mixer’s co-founder, Roman Storm, was caught in the crosshairs, despite being exclusively involved in writing software code for the resource and having no way of knowing for what purposes specific users were using it. He constantly insists, “I was just writing code, how can that be a crime?!”. But if you cross the path of the state authorities, any actions begin to be considered a crime, regardless of how they were viewed in former times.
Today, one can come up with many “digital” ways to fight the regulations and bans of the stationary bandit. And such a fight should definitely be conducted anonymously, since it will not back down from those who decide to openly challenge it, even if there were no precedents of prosecution for such activities in the past. De-anonymizing oneself is not at all necessary for success, as can be seen from the example of Libgen itself, which receives 16 million visits per month without having any public face to represent it.
