While movie and music piracy tends to generate the most headlines, the publishing industry is facing similar issues.

Pretty much every book or academic article is available online for free.

ZLibrary Domain Suspensions

In recent years, much attention has been focused on Sci-Hub but there are many other ‘shadow libraries’ as well. This includes ZLibrary, which is available through a variety of domain names. A few days ago, however, alarm bells went off.

Seemingly out of nowhere, ZLibrary’s b-ok.cc, b-ok.org, b-ok2.org and b-ok.xyz domains were all set to “clienthold” by their Chinese registrar “Now.top”. This meant that they were no longer accessible.

This is a serious issue and, according to ICANN, the clienthold status is uncommon and “usually enacted during legal disputes, non-payment,” or when a “domain is subject to deletion.”

In this case, it was a legal issue, although that was initially unclear to the ZLibrary team. When we contacted the site earlier this week it informed us that the domains simply disappeared without any notification from the registrar.

Harvard Business Publishing Complaint

This isn’t the first time the platform has run into domain issues. ZLibrary has been around for over a decade and it lost domain names on three previous occasions.

To find out more, we reached out to the registrar Eranet, which operates under the Now.top brand. The Chinese company informed us that ZLibrary was contacted beforehand in the form of a takedown notice.

Now.top received a DMCA notice from Harvard Business Publishing, listing several infringing publications that were posted on b-ok.cc. ZLibrary acknowledges this, but the site had no idea that this would result in an immediate domain suspension.

“We receive more than 1000 emails a day, most of them are automatically processed. On March 5th we had an email from tnet.hk asking us to remove some Harvard Business Publishing stuff. These materials were removed from that domain,” ZLibrary tells us.

Suspensions Were Lifted

Initially, ZLibrary assumed that the domains would be lost for good and the site started to point users to alternative domain names. However, as we were writing this article, things turned around.

All of a sudden, the domain suspensions were lifted and ZLibrary regained full control over their domains. Again, this happened without any heads up or explanation from the registrar.

CNNIC Rules

Luckily, Eranet was willing to explain their policy in more detail. The company tells us that it has to abide by the rules of the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) which requires it to take swift action in response to copyright complaints.

“As a registrar, we need to abide by CNNIC’s rules. Once the website has illegal information, we must suspend the analysis within three days, and we will also inform the holder of the email processing. If the holder responds to the processing, we can apply for lifting the suspension,” the registrar told us.

And indeed, after the registrar confirmed that the infringing content had been removed, the suspension was lifted. While that is good news for ZLibrary, another copyright complaint to the registrar could easily take the domains offline again.

Prepared For Future Problems

ZLibrary appears to realize that domains shouldn’t be taken for granted. The site is actively distributing its traffic to multiple domains, depending on people’s location. This also helps to evade site blocking efforts.

“Since last year we have been quite successfully implementing a set of measures to maximize traffic diversification. This allows us to work flexibly enough (although still far from perfect) and deal with blocking different domains or IP addresses in various countries,” ZLibrary says.

The ‘shadow library’ uses z-lib.org as the main entry domain at the moment, although that may change. While it’s clear that running such an operation isn’t without legal risk, the ZLibrary team is determined to keep on going.

“We believe that knowledge, including scientific books and scientific articles, should be free and available to the public,” ZLibrary says.