An interesting story recently 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 by the stationary bandit). However, enforcing this decision proved impossible – simply because no one knows who the actual creator and leader of this pirate library is. Furthermore, the judge’s decision prohibits anyone from participating in the resource’s activities, such as providing data storage, registering domains, or even distributing links to it. Nevertheless, the resource’s operation relies on the labor of thousands of volunteers from all over the world who upload files and distribute torrents, so besides the blocking of some domain names, the resource has not faced any problems.
This case contrasts sharply with the story of the creators of the crypto-mixer Tornado Cash. They did not act anonymously, openly presenting themselves as the creators of the resource. And for this, they were subjected to state prosecution. Even the co-founder of the mixer, Roman Storm, was caught in the crosshairs, despite the fact that he was exclusively involved in writing software code for the resource and could not have known for what purposes specific users were using it. He now 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 regarded in the past.
Today, one can devise many “digital” ways to fight the regulations and prohibitions of the stationary bandit. And such a struggle should definitely be conducted anonymously, because it will not let go of those who decide to openly challenge it, even if there were no precedents for prosecution for such activities in the past. De-anonymizing oneself is not at all necessary for success, as can be seen in the example of Libgen itself, which receives 16 million visits per month without having any public face to represent it.
