I predict that Libgen/SciHub and pirate sites in generall will be rendered functionally inaccessible in the developed west in the coming years. My reasoning is as follows:
Historically, IP owners have tried various strategies to increase revenues by curtailing infringement. In the early 2000s, IP owners tried to extract revenue directly from pirates via honeypot torrents and ISP subpoenas. Since about 2010, IP owners have shifted towards a more passive approach where they prioritize infringement for commercial purposes only and largely leave piracy for personal consumption alone. It just didn't make sense to chase after teenagers and students who probably wouldn't have had the money to make a legit purchase anyway.
LLMs trained on huge corpuses that include pirated content like LibGen change everything. Now, these IP holders face an existential (or at least severe) threat to their business models in the form of AI generated content. At the very least, these IP holders missed out on a massive opportunity to extract some the wealth created by AIs by virtue of their laxity in going after easily available pirate content.
I'd expect to see a strong swing back towards very draconian enforcement of against even personal infringement: domestic ISP DNS blocking, perhaps even mandatory browser or operating system level blocking of infringement.
Historically, IP owners have tried various strategies to increase revenues by curtailing infringement. In the early 2000s, IP owners tried to extract revenue directly from pirates via honeypot torrents and ISP subpoenas. Since about 2010, IP owners have shifted towards a more passive approach where they prioritize infringement for commercial purposes only and largely leave piracy for personal consumption alone. It just didn't make sense to chase after teenagers and students who probably wouldn't have had the money to make a legit purchase anyway.
LLMs trained on huge corpuses that include pirated content like LibGen change everything. Now, these IP holders face an existential (or at least severe) threat to their business models in the form of AI generated content. At the very least, these IP holders missed out on a massive opportunity to extract some the wealth created by AIs by virtue of their laxity in going after easily available pirate content.
I'd expect to see a strong swing back towards very draconian enforcement of against even personal infringement: domestic ISP DNS blocking, perhaps even mandatory browser or operating system level blocking of infringement.