File sharing communities

American non-profit organization

The Pirate Bay, commonly abbreviated as TPB, is a free searchable online index of movies, music, video games, pornography and software. Founded in 2003 by Swedish think tank Piratbyrån, The Pirate Bay facilitates the connection among users of the peer-to-peer torrent protocol, which are able to contribute to the site through the addition of magnet links. The Pirate Bay has consistently ranked as one of the most visited torrent websites in the world.

Sci-Hub is a shadow library that provides free access to millions of research papers, regardless of copyright, by bypassing publishers' paywalls in various ways. Unlike Library Genesis, it does not provide access to books. Sci-Hub was founded in Kazakhstan by Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, in response to the rising costs of research papers behind paywalls. The site is extensively used worldwide. In September 2019, the site's operator(s) said that it served approximately 400,000 requests per day. In addition to its intensive use, Sci-Hub stands out among other shadow libraries because of its easy

Anna's Archive is an open source search engine for shadow libraries that was launched by the pseudonymous Anna shortly after law enforcement efforts to shut down Z-Library in 2022. The site aggregates records from Z-Library, Sci-Hub, and Library Genesis (LibGen), among other sources. It calls itself "the largest truly open library in human history", and has said it aims to "catalog all the books in existence" and "track humanity's progress toward making all these books easily available in digital form". It claims not to be liable for downloads of copyrighted works since it does not directly host any files, instead linking to third-party downloads. It has nonetheless been targeted for engaging in large-scale copyright infringement, facing government blocks and legal action from rightsholders and publishing trade associations.

search engine for scientific articles and books

Scribd Inc. (pronounced ) is an American media company that operates four primary platforms: Scribd, Everand, SlideShare, and Fable. Scribd is a digital document library that hosts over 240 million documents. Everand is a digital content subscription service offering a wide selection of ebooks, audiobooks, magazines, podcasts, and sheet music. SlideShare is an online platform featuring 25 million presentations uploaded by subject matter experts.

Z-Library (abbreviated as z-lib, formerly BookFinder) is a shadow library project for file-sharing access to scholarly journal articles, academic texts and general-interest books. It began as a mirror of Library Genesis but has expanded dramatically.

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Demonoid is a BitTorrent tracker and website founded in 2003 to facilitate file-sharing–related discussion and provide a searchable index of torrent files. The site underwent intermittent periods of extended downtime in its history due to the occasional need to move the server, generally caused by cancellation of ISP service due to local political pressure.

RuTracker.org (also stylized as rutracker★org; known as torrents.ru until 2010) is the biggest Russian BitTorrent tracker. It hosts movies, TV shows, books, software, videogames, and other sorts of digital media. It is styled as a forum where each thread is a separate torrent of a piece of media. As of December 2024, it has 15.5 million registered active users, 2.592 million torrents (2.573 million of them being active), and the total volume of all torrents is 6.2 petabytes.

E-Hentai is an image-hosting and file-sharing website focused on hentai (Japanese cartoon pornography). The site hosts user-generated image galleries primarily of pornographic content originating or derived from anime, manga, and video games, such as fanart, scanlations of manga and dōjinshi, and cosplay photographs. Its sister site Exhentai (colloquially known as Sad Panda) was spun off from E-Hentai in 2010 to host artwork that depicts material that is illegal in certain jurisdictions, such as lolicon, shotacon, and bestiality.

KissAnime was an anime-focused file streaming website that hosted links and embedded videos, allowing users to stream or download movies and TV shows for free in violation of copyright laws. It was a sister site to the manga viewing website, KissManga. KissAnime was described as "one of the world’s biggest streaming anime websites".

Aminet is the world's largest archive of Amiga-related software and files. Aminet was originally hosted by several universities' FTP sites, and is now available on CD-ROM and on the web. According to Aminet, as of 3 September 2022, it has 83930 packages online.

organized network of pirate groups

Flibusta () is a shadow library project mainly for Russian language books. Its collection comprised over 630,000 books. Dissatisfied with the commercialization of Librusec, Russia's main shadow library, the website was established by a group of volunteers in October 2009. The founder and administrator of the site was known as "Stiver", who lived in Germany. The website had been the subject of legal action by Russian publishing houses on several occasions. German police investigated Stiver for two years but took no action against him in 2016. In 2016, the site was blocked in Russia according to

online archive of anarchism-related written works

Suprnova.org was a Slovenia-based website that distributed BitTorrent trackers for various music and video files, computer programs and games. Started in late 2002 by Andrej Preston (known as Slonček, Slovenian for "little elephant") and for a while considered the most popular BitTorrent search engine, Suprnova.org closed in late 2004 after legal threats. The site operators supported the development of the eXeem BitTorrent client software, deeming a fixed website too difficult to operate in the present legal climate. On 2 August 2007, the domain name was donated to The Pirate Bay, which relaun