They accepted payment to get around quotas (and probably ran ads). Even if it was a tiny percentage of people who engaged with them this way, or even if they profited at all, they took money in exchange for accessing an illicit resource. That is likely the main reason the teeth have come out to bite.
If anything though this might push that resource to the hands of people who can maintaining the massive library voluntarily and distributed with less ethical/morally-dubious implications.
Their system was set up to make money, much like iptorrents. Yes, you can use them for free, but they create very low artificial limits to funnel you into paying for premium services.
Your outrage is misplaced, these are not the pirates freeing books, these are parasites making money off of the pirates' work.
downloads were limited to a small number per day. if you wanted to download more there was a small fee ($1?). They tracked her Amazon account which had made $14k in purchases over the years.
I believe they also offered premium plans and for the longest time had a big banner on their site saying something like: "if you know of high risk payment processors, please reach out"
shh! do you want lingren to get taken down as well? whether accurately or not, the takedowns is attribute to a sudden burst of popularity due to social media sharing of the site.
Z-library was popular amongst everyone, hackernews is a really niche website. But I believe with that website going down people will start looking for alternatives.
If everything fails, we can always go back to download books through IRC.
How did they profit? If they even admitted that
> Defendants Operated Z-Library, Which Offered Free Download of Copyrighted Works
This is a complete nonsense