I don't know why they decided to pause uploads. Relying on Indian courts for sensible and timely judgments will only lead to grief. They do not respect precedence and judgements often depend on the judge and the people involved rather than the facts of the case.
What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.
This is tangential, but deference to precedent has become a huge problem in US and UK Commmon Law. So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position! The "legal research" battle -- like the "discovery" battle -- just adds tremendous time, expense, and complexity, and rarely or indeed almost never benefits the litigants or the court.
Strong disagree. A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making. Statute law cannot cover every case, and systems that pretend it can end up being hopelessly vague and unclear.
Common law is great. I'm much more uneasy about the alternative - i.e. legal systems where people become judges not long out of law school, with little real world experience, and proceed to make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives and livelihoods without feeling bound by precedent or being expected to explain their reasoning in any great amount of detail.
Also, word note, precedence means 'which things have priority over others?', whereas a precedent is 'something that has happened before'. A car at a green light has precedence, but the common law has precedents.
While no system is perfect, and it might be a case of the grass being greener on the other side, I have some healthy respect for the US system. I am not a fan of the UK system which we have copied almost wholesale. The laws and judgments I occasionally see from there are eerily similar to what we deal with here.
As for precedent, yes, things accumulate over time, but by-and-large precedent = predictability. And that is completely missing from our system.
I can see the point, but repeating the same action for which you are currently being prosecuted will hardly improve your standing before the court. Quite the opposite, in fact.
What did they expect? That an Indian court will give them some kind of immunity from copyright laws? From some media reports I see, the court has already made up its mind on the issue during a previous hearing:[1]
> However, the Court stated that Elbakyan, in her first written statement, admitted that the publishers were owners of copyrighted works. It also noted that Sci-Hub were rejected by the Court when they attempted to amend the statement in 2023. Further, it accused Sci-Hub of partaking in “online piracy” and LibGen “by unauthorized means, circumventing technological measures put in place by Plaintiffs to protect copyright in their literary works.” Thus, they rejected the plea.
I have to read a lot of papers for work. Sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Often when I find one I'm interested in, they want $60 to read the one paper. If I have to read one paper a day, that's about $20,000 a year just to stay up to date with the science.
That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.
I still had the same problem as a student at a major state school in the usa. Most schools don't subscribe to all the journals. I think I had IEEE and a few more, but more of the time they were paywalled.
I agree that that is ridiculous, but for many definitions of “for work”, $20k/year is well within the low end of “cost of doing business”.
I spend that much on computer hardware, and again that much on cloud services, and again that much on airfare each year, and I’m a one-person shop with very high margins.
I assume those papers are integral for your business. A $20k/year business expense is not really ridiculous. You think it is ridiculous because you can pirate it and get it for free. They are bytes and bytes are worthless or something.
It just depends on what kind of society you want to live in, one where information flows freely, or one where taxes can be levied against the entire society’s access to information, and public funds are used to protect the tax-levying middle men, and to subsidize the discovery and production of valuable information.
And obviously, for most individuals and businesses worldwide 20k USD/year is an insane expense, the fact that big moneybags that could have easily paid might get to come along for the ride is a small acceptable price to pay for making information universally accessible.
Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but to me, if there's something offered to you for a certain price, and you're not ready to pay that price, the alternative should be to either get something comparable that's cheaper (hardly possible with scientific papers) or, unfortunately, abstain from getting that thing at all.
I don't see how "what they're charging is ridiculous, and the money isn't even going to the authors, so it's okay for me to get the papers through sci-hub" is morally justified.
Independent of the above: if it's for work, your employer should pay for the paper access (unless you're self-employed, of course).
Just because something has a price associated with it, that does not make the pricing model inherently correct or just. The majority of research papers, at least in the U.S., are (or historically have been, I don't know the data now under the current administration) publicly funded, one way or another. Publicly-funded research should not be behind paywalls.
> Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life.
You eat apples, but if you replaced "apples" with "human babies", then by eating them you would be committing murder and cannibalism. It's an unpopular opinion, but this logical argument proves you are a murdering cannibalistic monster.
Your unpopular opinion is fallacious, markets can fail and as a result grey/black markets arise. This sci-hub issue is plausible evidence of that. Moreover there are systems where markets could be entirely inappropriate. But there's no law of nature or god that tells us how to decide as a society. Indeed it is your very mention of consumerism that belies this presupposition.
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals."
An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth. Nothing matters, and nothing should matter other than that. For future discoveries, we should make knowledge as accessible as possible. But when an organization forms, it competes for power and superiority. This results in discriminatory actions that cause the overall regression of collective innovation. It is sad to see this happen.
> An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth.
Maybe I'm in a certain type of bubble, but I kind of feel like that's a secondary goal (for many of them), while the first is finding and keeping a position that lets them earn enough money to survive. Some of them are lucky to be able to do both, but quite a lot of them are sacrificing the "pursuit of truth" because otherwise they wouldn't be able to feed themselves by working as a researcher.
i am not talking about people who just do job to survive there comes a point where you achieve all your needs you need something intangible like pursuit of truth/power/authority to validate your existence.
I could blame the people in the institutions, but they were once a student who wanted nothing but to achieve great things, world-changing research. But along the way they tasted power and authority. Science has inherent quality of giving power and control, realizing that every action has consequence, and in this godless world only actions you take matter. If anyone who has experienced the authority knows that it is addictive and it is hard to let go. If anyone (young budding scientists) can challenge that authority you would go to any lengths to prevent that i think this is what is happening here.
There's a long list of researchers who have done horrible things in pursuit of truth. Research ethics exist to remind us that, yes, other things matter.
Are you aware that you're not paying the authors, but paying the journal, who usually don't pay the authors anything and even demand payment FROM the author to publish their article in the first place? This is not like buying a book, journals are leeches with morally indefensible business models.
Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries. I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain. I'm just glad that my country is still holding out with no centralized censorship authority or mechanism to mass block websites, though that might not last for long with how things are going right now.
> I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain.
I'm currently reaching it from Spain after a certificate warning. We have our own disgraceful internet access thing going on nationally at the moment, but it doesn't really depend on domains.
The freedom of the internet has peaked. I firmly believe the future of the internet is balkanisation, we’ll have “state networks” like China’s with limited intercommunication. The future will suck. Archive everything.
Same in Denmark. They even stopped DNS-blocking it by redirecting to a page telling you that you have been blocked. Instead they now DNS-block it by redirecting you to 127.0.0.1.
Depends how it's implemented - once you've found the correct IP address you still have to connect to it, and some ISPs block and otherwise mess with traffic at that stage.
In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.
(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)
The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.
Most ISPs nowadays use DPI to do these blocks which are actually redirects. And with how ssl certificates work, users will only see an error page instead of the redirected domain.
> Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?
Depends. It seems Spain is doing interception on the data going from/to IPs, as resolving sci-hub.se with my ISP resolver gives me the same IP as I get when doing it externally (186.2.163.219), but when I visit https://sci-hub.se I see a "Certificate not correct" warning, since the certificate belongs to allot.com, which seems to be the party actually implementing the block here.
# poison the DNS: you can use another unaffected DNS to bypass.
# ISP level or country level content filtering (similar to the GFW of China): you need a VPN that won't be blocked, and make sure the exit node is unaffected. (also the police won't care?)
# take down the server: finger cross that they serve the content from safe location.
Isn't the court's job to judge on compliance with the law, rather than looking at outcomes? Considering outcomes, I'd say, is the job of those writing the laws.
> However, the New Delhi court was never able to make a decision on the matter. The hearings about Sci-Hub were re-scheduled again and again over the course of months and years
Unfortunately this is a common tactic - get a ruling which favors you and then file for delays citing sometimes ridiculous excuse. There is no concept of "justice delayed is justice denied" - lot of cases stay in limbo.
>I'm aware that although the interim order to block the websites was passed, the case itself is not settled. There are currently intervenors in the case, that you can join.
The tactic will remain the same. Keep the case in limbo.
That said, people have the jugaad-mindset so, you can bet if this goes through people will find ways to circumvent at massive scale.
Readit News
What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
This is tangential, but deference to precedent has become a huge problem in US and UK Commmon Law. So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position! The "legal research" battle -- like the "discovery" battle -- just adds tremendous time, expense, and complexity, and rarely or indeed almost never benefits the litigants or the court.
Common law is great. I'm much more uneasy about the alternative - i.e. legal systems where people become judges not long out of law school, with little real world experience, and proceed to make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives and livelihoods without feeling bound by precedent or being expected to explain their reasoning in any great amount of detail.
Also, word note, precedence means 'which things have priority over others?', whereas a precedent is 'something that has happened before'. A car at a green light has precedence, but the common law has precedents.
As for precedent, yes, things accumulate over time, but by-and-large precedent = predictability. And that is completely missing from our system.
Deleted Comment
that is FUD, and irresponsible to repeat
There’s one particularly notorious character whose rate card has been published online. He charges INR 1.5 million per appearance in court.
The reality is of course that then the appropriate judges will hear the case.
Rarely, if ever, will a judge recuse themselves. Strangely, this happened last week.
https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/nclat-judge-chennai-recu...
> However, the Court stated that Elbakyan, in her first written statement, admitted that the publishers were owners of copyrighted works. It also noted that Sci-Hub were rejected by the Court when they attempted to amend the statement in 2023. Further, it accused Sci-Hub of partaking in “online piracy” and LibGen “by unauthorized means, circumventing technological measures put in place by Plaintiffs to protect copyright in their literary works.” Thus, they rejected the plea.
[1] https://www.medianama.com/2024/05/223-delhi-hc-lawsuit-sci-h...
That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.
What always bothered me about those though is their terribly clunky UI, dozens of redirects, weird auth flows, and more.
I spend that much on computer hardware, and again that much on cloud services, and again that much on airfare each year, and I’m a one-person shop with very high margins.
Services are also a supply chain.
Deleted Comment
Deleted Comment
And obviously, for most individuals and businesses worldwide 20k USD/year is an insane expense, the fact that big moneybags that could have easily paid might get to come along for the ride is a small acceptable price to pay for making information universally accessible.
I don't see how "what they're charging is ridiculous, and the money isn't even going to the authors, so it's okay for me to get the papers through sci-hub" is morally justified.
Independent of the above: if it's for work, your employer should pay for the paper access (unless you're self-employed, of course).
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/funding-sources-of-acad...
You eat apples, but if you replaced "apples" with "human babies", then by eating them you would be committing murder and cannibalism. It's an unpopular opinion, but this logical argument proves you are a murdering cannibalistic monster.
Copyright was created for the specific purpose of censorship.
Maybe I'm in a certain type of bubble, but I kind of feel like that's a secondary goal (for many of them), while the first is finding and keeping a position that lets them earn enough money to survive. Some of them are lucky to be able to do both, but quite a lot of them are sacrificing the "pursuit of truth" because otherwise they wouldn't be able to feed themselves by working as a researcher.
There's a long list of researchers who have done horrible things in pursuit of truth. Research ethics exist to remind us that, yes, other things matter.
Dead Comment
Are you aware that you're not paying the authors, but paying the journal, who usually don't pay the authors anything and even demand payment FROM the author to publish their article in the first place? This is not like buying a book, journals are leeches with morally indefensible business models.
clicks the link
blocked
Oh right, France government is shameful too.
At this point, it is a global phenomenon (and there's been discussions at the UN General Assembly on carving up interwebs for "security"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_sovereignty
I'm currently reaching it from Spain after a certificate warning. We have our own disgraceful internet access thing going on nationally at the moment, but it doesn't really depend on domains.
Sadly, most of the Europe is in favour of various kind of censorship and surveillance, vide https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1n22e8s/stances_on...
I wonder if a french researcher (or a French student in a university/engineering school) could check if it's still the case.
If you had any doubt…
In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.
(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)
The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.
If you're on Android you can use Intra from google https://getintra.org/intl/en-GB/#!/
Or if you're on Windows you can use GoodbyeDPI https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI
Both will split up your dns requests into chunks so the ISPs filter won't catch it.
Depends. It seems Spain is doing interception on the data going from/to IPs, as resolving sci-hub.se with my ISP resolver gives me the same IP as I get when doing it externally (186.2.163.219), but when I visit https://sci-hub.se I see a "Certificate not correct" warning, since the certificate belongs to allot.com, which seems to be the party actually implementing the block here.
# poison the DNS: you can use another unaffected DNS to bypass.
# ISP level or country level content filtering (similar to the GFW of China): you need a VPN that won't be blocked, and make sure the exit node is unaffected. (also the police won't care?)
# take down the server: finger cross that they serve the content from safe location.
Dead Comment
Then we meet the question again: how to protect children/copyright owner without censorship?
or how to censor content while keeping freedom of speech?
Currently, many LLM services only provide stuff from the study abstract.
But yes, not a good look to bend down to foreign publishing companies. They should have told them to f off.
Then the universities have to pay a 3rd party both to publish said research and to get access to research done by others in the same field.
Even though it is free for researches/students it costs universities (and therefore indirectly taxpayers) multiple millions $/year.
Fuck that. Also, after the scandals of predatory practices (e.g. https://top2percentscientists.com/peer-review-payment-scanda...) is there really a benefit in using the services these society leeches provide?
Unfortunately this is a common tactic - get a ruling which favors you and then file for delays citing sometimes ridiculous excuse. There is no concept of "justice delayed is justice denied" - lot of cases stay in limbo.
>I'm aware that although the interim order to block the websites was passed, the case itself is not settled. There are currently intervenors in the case, that you can join.
The tactic will remain the same. Keep the case in limbo.
That said, people have the jugaad-mindset so, you can bet if this goes through people will find ways to circumvent at massive scale.