Major Russian pirate library Flibusta shuts down as founder battles terminal cancer
The free pirate library Flibusta, outlawed and blocked in Russia, has closed down as its creator fights an aggressive brain tumor.
Image by Cybernews.
The free pirate library Flibusta, outlawed and blocked in Russia, has closed down as its creator fights an aggressive brain tumor.
The website was no longer accessible on September 25th, despite the admin claiming that it should stay online for a few more weeks.
“This is Stiver. I'm in the hospital with an obscenely sized glioblastoma. Unfortunately, Flibusta seems to have ended here, as did I. Thanks everyone, it was fun. The servers are paid for for a few more weeks,” the admin posted the last message on Flibusta’s forum on September 23rd.
Glioblastoma is an aggressive brain tumor, which has a very poor prognosis for survival.
Flibusta offered books in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian for free to all users, while foreign literature was available to registered users only. The pirate library was created in October 2009 by a person who claimed to live in Germany and went by the moniker Stiver.
Before the closure, the online library collected around 620 thousand books of various genres and had more than 1.3 million registered users.
Roskomandzor, the Russian federal executive agency responsible for monitoring, controlling, and censoring mass media, had blacklisted Flibusta due to claims of copyright infringement, according to the Russian media. Flibusta managed to stay online due to its numerous mirror websites.