“These types of illegal shadow libraries are very harmful. The only ones who benefit are the anonymous owners of these illegal services. Authors and publishers see no return on their efforts and investments,” BREIN comments.

1. Researchers who need access to the papers do benefit.

2. The researchers who wrote the papers don't see a penny anyway

Do the service owners/providers even have meaningful benefit? Anna's archive asks for "volunteers" to run mirrors. I have to imagine that most users do not pay for content that they download.

All I see is a middle man, who I think the world would be better off without, telling people that they are harmed because a good which only exists as a legal fabrication is being replicated without them being able to tell people what to do.

Do these shadow libraries comply with DMCA take down notices?

If they are not located in the US, why would they?

According to comments on the subreddit, they are ignored; from memory from reading on their about page or GitLab iirc, due to the way their hosting and caches/proxies work, their content is legal in whatever jurisdictions it operates in. Hope that helps.

I had heard of LibGen and Z-library, but not Anna's Archive. Thanks for the recommendation Dutch Court!

all these services are going to have to rely more on tor, i2p, and alternative DNS