Context
ADR-053 lists cases that stay Unavailable. One of them is “a copy the
owner could not lawfully use”, and that case includes “an upload whose
uploader is unknown”. The readers on 2026-10-29 were also briefed to
refuse “uploads of unknown provenance”. They applied the rule unevenly:
- Two works were read from copies of their published versions on a course or group page: Jasanoff (LIT-1594), from a University of Colorado course page, and PBFT (LIT-1217), from MIT PDOS’s 6.824 page.
- Ten works were left
UnavailableorUnfetchedbecause the same kind of copy was turned down: LIT-1208, LIT-1214, LIT-1220, LIT-1398, LIT-1405, LIT-1406, LIT-1408, LIT-1410, LIT-1413 and LIT-1445. The copies sat on MIT, University of Washington, Princeton and TU Wien course pages, on hedweb.com and rangevoting.org, and on academia.edu.
The curation entry of that day put the inconsistency to the owner. The owner answered: “let’s go find and read the stuff that they mistakenly turned down.”
Decision
-
These copies count. Each is a copy of a published article, or of an author’s manuscript, that a work can be read from:
- a university course or reading-list page;
- a faculty or research-group page;
- a scholarly third-party site that hosts papers for discussion;
- an author’s own upload, as on academia.edu or ResearchGate.
The reading’s NOTE names the exact copy, and the reader checks that it is the work: its title, authors and pages.
-
These still do not count. Shadow libraries and ebook-piracy sites (Sci-Hub, LibGen, Anna’s Archive, epdf.pub and the like), and uploads of whole in-copyright books, such as a trade book on the Internet Archive or a press’s book on a file host. These are what the earlier refusals of Kahneman (LIT-1209) and Herd & Moynihan (LIT-1609) turned on, and those refusals stand.
-
ADR-053 narrows. Its rule that “a copy the owner could not lawfully use stays Unavailable” stands. Its example of “an upload whose uploader is unknown” now covers only the cases in the second bullet above.
Alternatives
- Keep the strict reading, and send these copies to the owner as
Unfetched. This is what the first pass did for some of them. It makes the owner fetch, by hand, a copy the client already holds. Those are the clicks ADR-053 was written to cut down. - Accept any copy that can be found. Rejected. A shadow library or a pirated book is not something the record should rest on, and the owner asked only for the course-page kind.