8 ms·

US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub

221 points by stevemclaugh 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
return0 9y ago
Maybe they need to block sci-hub so scientists finally wake up and do something. I mean everyone i know loves sci-hub because it feels like a real upgrade for searching the literature. A lot of ppl will be mad if it is closed down. The science community needs to come up with some kind of intermediate measures since open access publishing is not really catching up. For example, there could be laws that prevent publishers from withholding the copyrights from the authors, so the authors can always upload their papers and their commentaries for free elsewhere (i 'm sure someone will make a nice website for that - we already have arxiv &bioarxiv). Universities can continue paying their subscriptions to the journals , but blocking the right to free access to publicly-funded works is highly unethical.
Idontknowmyuser 9y ago
I wonder what are the challenges against implementing an open "near-full-automated" journal? - anyone can submit a paper. which is stored in the yet to be reviewed section. - only users with confirmed university affilation / users that published more than X papers can opt in to become a reviewer. - a reviewer is randomly selected to receive a review offer [in his indicated field] which he can accept or decline. - the user and the reviewer are than linked together anonymously and their correspondance is stored to be published with the paper under review section. - after that the reviewer makes a decision. - when enough reviewers have made their decision, the paper is marked as rejected, or moved to the published section according to a majority rule. - if the paper failed,the user then can choose to either: * (modify the paper = optional) and resubmit * keep the paper public but indicate it failed the review process * delete the paper - if the paper gets published,trusted users of the site can then leave feedback (through the UI) to indicate: * whether they could reproduce the results or not: this might help alert the author if there are unclear parts in thier methodology description. * if the paper was helpful/intresting to them. * add community questions under the paper, which can be answered by the author / or a trusted user. - authors can edit their work to correct in anytime they want [ allowing a faster correction of mistakes] , change history is kept to prevent abuse. from a programming point of view it doesn't seem that hard to do. so what are the relevant obstacles?
- djsumdog 9y ago
  So a StackOverflow model for papers? Haven't a few people been attempting that in some of the open access projects?
- kilotaras 9y ago
  Problem with journals is not technological, but a coordination one (same as with p-value). If every scientist "defects" to open-access journal - everyone is better of. But if only a handful do that they will lose impact factor and will take a hit to their career. Addition: This is commonly known as Nash Equilibrium[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
kw71 9y ago
I have been following this judge, Leonie Brinkema for about twenty years. Her court and rulings are interesting and amusing. It seems to me like she lets a lot of nonsense fly to rule in favor of her personal beliefs or patrons or whatever they may be. I think I have caught her applying different rules at times. This might be an abusive technical default judgment, considering the actual value of the works and other issues like process service shenanigans that are common with these judgments. I would love to hear what her rationale for this dollar amount is. After watching her for so long, the "airplane" level of "unbelievable bs" in her transcripts and rulings makes me want to wager the answer is among: they're my friends; I like this type of plaintiff; this is the order they presented and I simply signed it without consideration or review.
lykr0n 9y ago
I don't want to be that guy, but nothing here seems outlandish. A website is actively violating US law, didn't show up to defend itself, and now facing an injunction. The same happens for foreign entities that do not comply with US law. I'll be interested to see how far this goes, and if any ISPs start blocking the site. With the whole Net Neutrality debate, I'm curious to see if the ISPs change their stance when they start getting ordered to block sites.
- wccrawford 9y ago
  The blocking of the site by ISPs and search engines is the bad part, IMO. Other than that, it seems pretty standard. And it's kind of dumb, because they could just get a new domain name, like many of the other torrent sites do. It's effectively worthless.
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    It's also a first amendment violation. Do US ISPs currently actively block any websites? US ISPs do have mandatory monitoring, which means you can get to child porn sites, but you immediately get reported for it.
  - avh02 9y ago
    I grew up in a country where certain websites (you know, like adult sites) are blocked, I'm not comparing this to that exactly, but isn't it strange to be told that your ISP is hereby not allowed to provide you access to a website? Especially when nobody unanimously agrees that it's a bad thing? (I'm not here to argue the ethics/morality of it, but pointing out that it has proponents on both sides) I mean, I know blocking some content is the norm in many countries (lots of European countries do it for various purposes (nazi content, child porn, etc, that are almost unanimously considered 'bad')). Isn't this a drastic new step for the US? (again, I don't exactly keep up with this, but this seems new to me)
    - tomjen3 9y ago
      Dane here. Our ISPs blocked a lot of sites and claimed they were all cp, but when the list (or partial they wouldn't comment) got leaked on wikileaks it turned out to be also a bunch of gay sites as well as a dutch company selling trucks for warehouses - not exactly dressed, but also not CP. So I wouldn't trust the integrity of any system which we are being denied information about.
Overtonwindow 9y ago
Thankfully there's TOR and other methods to get around this. I disagree completely with the courts. Long live Sci-Hub
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  The worrying thing is that now there's a single point of failure: Elbakyan. She has the power to cut off anyone she wants to, and she did it in the past to some Russian university that dared criticize her.
  - roywiggins 9y ago
    I guess anyone who wants to take on the legal risk is welcome to start up their own version hosted on IPFS.
  - aw3c2 9y ago
    Do your part and start mirroring parts of it! http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Okay. I've got a dedicated seed box but it is only DSL. I have ample disk space. What am I looking at, at that link? Is there a 'mirror the whole damned thing' torrent and how frequently should I update this? I already mirror a bunch of Linux ISOs, so it's not a problem to add more.
      - gpm 9y ago
        Looking at the dates on the file list, I suspect not, and that the way you keep up to date is to keep adding the new torrents as they come out. Since torrents are immutable it makes sense... would otherwise be a pain to update.
        KGIII 9y ago
Knufen 9y ago
As someone who works in academia (Europe) I understand that scientific papers need hosting and server space and such, but does it really help humanity that all advances will be behind very expensive pay walls? I would argue otherwise. The current trend is not sustainable nor favorable for anyone except parasitic publishers. Edit: I understand the website was breaking the law, but this seems like symptom treating
- ickwabe 9y ago
  Scientists need to try more "radical sharing"[1] as the member journalists of the ICIJ[2] did in order to report on the Panama and Paradise Papers. Setting aside ego,etc. I would think result in faster real-world discoveries and applicitions for the good of all. [1]https://www.icij.org/blog/2016/12/radical-sharing-breaking-paradigms-achieve-change/ https://www.icij.org/blog/2016/12/radical-sharing-breaking-p... [2]International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
- cobookman 9y ago
  Don't forget the peer review and vetting process. As for the price I don't think it's really that expensive. I've never heard of a research University unable to afford it. And if not for the fees we'd have no journals. Maybe when we are post scarcity then it'd be free. But until then people's time is not unlimited and is worth something.
  - Xylakant 9y ago
    > Don't forget the peer review and vetting process. The peer review often happens by unpaid peers, even for commercial journals. It's really not the dominating factor for costs.
    - diffeomorphism 9y ago
      > The peer review often happens by unpaid peers Do you know of an example of paid reviews? This would seem like a big conflict of interest and I have not heard of any but predatory journals doing that. Historically, a large cost was typesetting and print publication. However, print is used less and less in favor of online subscriptions and typesetting is mostly using the publisher's LaTeX style file. The "value" provided by journals seems to be: - communication with the editor (unpaid, mostly senior peer researcher) - review (unpaid peer) - software to manage submissions, reviews etc (commercial) - proofreading for typos and some fine tuning for figures and layout (useful) - prestige of having published in an important journal (very valuable for your career)
revmoo 9y ago
So we're going to have a great firewall of America now? Wow.
dayaz36 9y ago
Today is Alexandra Elbakyan's birthday. Not a good time to receive bad news
- omginternets 9y ago
  Free publicity is hardly bad news ;)
gooseus 9y ago
I support Scihub and all efforts to make the body of human knowledge and scientific research freely available to all humans... especially if any of the research has been funded by taxpayer dollars. I believe that at most, these journals should enjoy a limited copyright that expires after a short time (1-10 years?) after which the papers should be freely available. That being said, this is disappointing to me: > Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court. As a result, a default was entered against the site. This response creates no opportunity to argue a compelling case for why scientific knowledge should not remain pay-walled by publishers and/or establish new legal frameworks for copyright of scientific knowledge. Here is a bonus article from Priceonomics I'm a big fan of (that I'm sure has been shared here before) about why paywalled science is Bullshit: https://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-paywall https://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-beh...
- someonewhocar3s 9y ago
  You should wonder what kind of judge would punish Sci-Hub in absence, given the US is like as not to imprison and disproportionally fine whomever is sent to represent Sci-Hub. This is not the 1800's anymore. You can't expect someone to /want/ to come to YOUR court to HELP YOU apply YOUR LAW in YOUR NATION, especially not with the HUGE RISKS!
- ArchReaper 9y ago
  >This response creates no opportunity to argue a compelling case for why scientific knowledge should not remain pay-walled by publishers and/or establish new legal frameworks for copyright of scientific knowledge. You somehow think this would have been the correct platform to do that? While being a target of a copyright-infringement lawsuit?
someonewhocar3s 9y ago
It is a source of >purely< academic information, useless for 'commercial purposes', and they're taking it down. That's all.
ixacto 9y ago
This is not going to do anything. Libgen.io or https://libgen.pw/ https://libgen.pw/ if scihub is down.
bastawhiz 9y ago
This sounds like the perfect use case for IPFS.
c517402 9y ago
Government research grants need to require that papers produced are available online for free. This would rapidly change the academic publishing situation.
- return0 9y ago
  many funding bodies do. but what to do about older papers?
  - c517402 9y ago
    Maybe a law reducing the length of copyright on academic papers to a few years.
    - return0 9y ago
      actually thats not a good idea. A paper may already take 1+ year to go from experiment to publication, it should be open for everyone to read immediately to be most useful - science moves fast.
mnm1 9y ago
I fail to see how the injunction is not a violation of the first amendment right of search engines and ISPs to display any legal content they want--and we are talking about legal content here (links). It is clearly improper under DMCA, but it seems to me such injunctions are simply unconstitutional, DMCA or not. Anyone care to explain the twisted logic of the court here?
- joliv 9y ago
  First, the Court sees Sci-Hub as essentially hosting the copyrighted materials. From the order in ACS v. Does: > ...Sci-Hub has copied elements—and, in many cases, the entirety of—those works, and that Sci-Hub has distributed those works by allowing individuals to download the works from its website, all in violation of the Copyright Act. But to entertain your argument of First Amendment protections, linking to infringing documents is pretty clearly incitement of imminent lawless action as established in Brandenburg.
jancsika 9y ago
Ok IPFS fans, here's your chance. Can you build a better boat?
jklein11 9y ago
Do articles that are published in journals meet some sort of specification? If you find a study that was published in a journal do you automatically find it more credible than a random article you find on the internet? If so, what has the journal done to achieve that credibility. The way I see it, the value academic journals provide is to verify that the study is from a reputable source. It's not the distribution of the articles that you are paying for, it is the curation. Something like Sci-Hub would not be able to exist without the publications first verifying that the studies are legitimate. I know very little about the world of academic publishing, so I'm not sure if my take on this situation is totally off.
drtillberg 9y ago
It is not obvious to me that the judge intended to order worldwide ISPs unaffiliated with sci-hub to block all traffic to sci-hub. Seems still to be referring to sci-hub's ISP. The reference to search engines is odd, though. Hypothetically, a search engine indexes documents from that court case, and the documents name the address of the outlaw website. Does that violate the order?

221 points by stevemclaugh 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Maybe they need to block sci-hub so scientists finally wake up and do something. I mean everyone i know loves sci-hub because it feels like a real upgrade for searching the literature. A lot of ppl will be mad if it is closed down. The science community needs to come up with some kind of intermediate measures since open access publishing is not really catching up. For example, there could be laws that prevent publishers from withholding the copyrights from the authors, so the authors can always upload their papers and their commentaries for free elsewhere (i 'm sure someone will make a nice website for that - we already have arxiv &bioarxiv). Universities can continue paying their subscriptions to the journals , but blocking the right to free access to publicly-funded works is highly unethical.

Idontknowmyuser 9y ago

I wonder what are the challenges against implementing an open "near-full-automated" journal? - anyone can submit a paper. which is stored in the yet to be reviewed section. - only users with confirmed university affilation / users that published more than X papers can opt in to become a reviewer. - a reviewer is randomly selected to receive a review offer [in his indicated field] which he can accept or decline. - the user and the reviewer are than linked together anonymously and their correspondance is stored to be published with the paper under review section. - after that the reviewer makes a decision. - when enough reviewers have made their decision, the paper is marked as rejected, or moved to the published section according to a majority rule. - if the paper failed,the user then can choose to either: * (modify the paper = optional) and resubmit * keep the paper public but indicate it failed the review process * delete the paper - if the paper gets published,trusted users of the site can then leave feedback (through the UI) to indicate: * whether they could reproduce the results or not: this might help alert the author if there are unclear parts in thier methodology description. * if the paper was helpful/intresting to them. * add community questions under the paper, which can be answered by the author / or a trusted user. - authors can edit their work to correct in anytime they want [ allowing a faster correction of mistakes] , change history is kept to prevent abuse. from a programming point of view it doesn't seem that hard to do. so what are the relevant obstacles?

djsumdog 9y ago
So a StackOverflow model for papers? Haven't a few people been attempting that in some of the open access projects?
kilotaras 9y ago
Problem with journals is not technological, but a coordination one (same as with p-value). If every scientist "defects" to open-access journal - everyone is better of. But if only a handful do that they will lose impact factor and will take a hit to their career. Addition: This is commonly known as Nash Equilibrium[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

kw71 9y ago

I have been following this judge, Leonie Brinkema for about twenty years. Her court and rulings are interesting and amusing. It seems to me like she lets a lot of nonsense fly to rule in favor of her personal beliefs or patrons or whatever they may be. I think I have caught her applying different rules at times. This might be an abusive technical default judgment, considering the actual value of the works and other issues like process service shenanigans that are common with these judgments. I would love to hear what her rationale for this dollar amount is. After watching her for so long, the "airplane" level of "unbelievable bs" in her transcripts and rulings makes me want to wager the answer is among: they're my friends; I like this type of plaintiff; this is the order they presented and I simply signed it without consideration or review.

lykr0n 9y ago

I don't want to be that guy, but nothing here seems outlandish. A website is actively violating US law, didn't show up to defend itself, and now facing an injunction. The same happens for foreign entities that do not comply with US law. I'll be interested to see how far this goes, and if any ISPs start blocking the site. With the whole Net Neutrality debate, I'm curious to see if the ISPs change their stance when they start getting ordered to block sites.

wccrawford 9y ago
The blocking of the site by ISPs and search engines is the bad part, IMO. Other than that, it seems pretty standard. And it's kind of dumb, because they could just get a new domain name, like many of the other torrent sites do. It's effectively worthless.
- djsumdog 9y ago
  It's also a first amendment violation. Do US ISPs currently actively block any websites? US ISPs do have mandatory monitoring, which means you can get to child porn sites, but you immediately get reported for it.
- avh02 9y ago
  I grew up in a country where certain websites (you know, like adult sites) are blocked, I'm not comparing this to that exactly, but isn't it strange to be told that your ISP is hereby not allowed to provide you access to a website? Especially when nobody unanimously agrees that it's a bad thing? (I'm not here to argue the ethics/morality of it, but pointing out that it has proponents on both sides) I mean, I know blocking some content is the norm in many countries (lots of European countries do it for various purposes (nazi content, child porn, etc, that are almost unanimously considered 'bad')). Isn't this a drastic new step for the US? (again, I don't exactly keep up with this, but this seems new to me)
  - tomjen3 9y ago
    Dane here. Our ISPs blocked a lot of sites and claimed they were all cp, but when the list (or partial they wouldn't comment) got leaked on wikileaks it turned out to be also a bunch of gay sites as well as a dutch company selling trucks for warehouses - not exactly dressed, but also not CP. So I wouldn't trust the integrity of any system which we are being denied information about.

Overtonwindow 9y ago

Thankfully there's TOR and other methods to get around this. I disagree completely with the courts. Long live Sci-Hub

HarryHirsch 9y ago
The worrying thing is that now there's a single point of failure: Elbakyan. She has the power to cut off anyone she wants to, and she did it in the past to some Russian university that dared criticize her.
- roywiggins 9y ago
  I guess anyone who wants to take on the legal risk is welcome to start up their own version hosted on IPFS.
- aw3c2 9y ago
  Do your part and start mirroring parts of it! http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/ http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent/
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Okay. I've got a dedicated seed box but it is only DSL. I have ample disk space. What am I looking at, at that link? Is there a 'mirror the whole damned thing' torrent and how frequently should I update this? I already mirror a bunch of Linux ISOs, so it's not a problem to add more.
    - gpm 9y ago
      Looking at the dates on the file list, I suspect not, and that the way you keep up to date is to keep adding the new torrents as they come out. Since torrents are immutable it makes sense... would otherwise be a pain to update.
      - KGIII 9y ago

Knufen 9y ago

As someone who works in academia (Europe) I understand that scientific papers need hosting and server space and such, but does it really help humanity that all advances will be behind very expensive pay walls? I would argue otherwise. The current trend is not sustainable nor favorable for anyone except parasitic publishers. Edit: I understand the website was breaking the law, but this seems like symptom treating

ickwabe 9y ago
Scientists need to try more "radical sharing"[1] as the member journalists of the ICIJ[2] did in order to report on the Panama and Paradise Papers. Setting aside ego,etc. I would think result in faster real-world discoveries and applicitions for the good of all. [1]https://www.icij.org/blog/2016/12/radical-sharing-breaking-paradigms-achieve-change/ https://www.icij.org/blog/2016/12/radical-sharing-breaking-p... [2]International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
cobookman 9y ago
Don't forget the peer review and vetting process. As for the price I don't think it's really that expensive. I've never heard of a research University unable to afford it. And if not for the fees we'd have no journals. Maybe when we are post scarcity then it'd be free. But until then people's time is not unlimited and is worth something.
- Xylakant 9y ago
  > Don't forget the peer review and vetting process. The peer review often happens by unpaid peers, even for commercial journals. It's really not the dominating factor for costs.
  - diffeomorphism 9y ago
    > The peer review often happens by unpaid peers Do you know of an example of paid reviews? This would seem like a big conflict of interest and I have not heard of any but predatory journals doing that. Historically, a large cost was typesetting and print publication. However, print is used less and less in favor of online subscriptions and typesetting is mostly using the publisher's LaTeX style file. The "value" provided by journals seems to be: - communication with the editor (unpaid, mostly senior peer researcher) - review (unpaid peer) - software to manage submissions, reviews etc (commercial) - proofreading for typos and some fine tuning for figures and layout (useful) - prestige of having published in an important journal (very valuable for your career)

revmoo 9y ago

So we're going to have a great firewall of America now? Wow.

dayaz36 9y ago

Today is Alexandra Elbakyan's birthday. Not a good time to receive bad news

omginternets 9y ago
Free publicity is hardly bad news ;)

gooseus 9y ago

I support Scihub and all efforts to make the body of human knowledge and scientific research freely available to all humans... especially if any of the research has been funded by taxpayer dollars. I believe that at most, these journals should enjoy a limited copyright that expires after a short time (1-10 years?) after which the papers should be freely available. That being said, this is disappointing to me: > Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court. As a result, a default was entered against the site. This response creates no opportunity to argue a compelling case for why scientific knowledge should not remain pay-walled by publishers and/or establish new legal frameworks for copyright of scientific knowledge. Here is a bonus article from Priceonomics I'm a big fan of (that I'm sure has been shared here before) about why paywalled science is Bullshit: https://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-behind-a-paywall https://priceonomics.com/post/50096804256/why-is-science-beh...

someonewhocar3s 9y ago
You should wonder what kind of judge would punish Sci-Hub in absence, given the US is like as not to imprison and disproportionally fine whomever is sent to represent Sci-Hub. This is not the 1800's anymore. You can't expect someone to /want/ to come to YOUR court to HELP YOU apply YOUR LAW in YOUR NATION, especially not with the HUGE RISKS!
ArchReaper 9y ago
>This response creates no opportunity to argue a compelling case for why scientific knowledge should not remain pay-walled by publishers and/or establish new legal frameworks for copyright of scientific knowledge. You somehow think this would have been the correct platform to do that? While being a target of a copyright-infringement lawsuit?

someonewhocar3s 9y ago

It is a source of >purely< academic information, useless for 'commercial purposes', and they're taking it down. That's all.

ixacto 9y ago

This is not going to do anything. Libgen.io or https://libgen.pw/ https://libgen.pw/ if scihub is down.

bastawhiz 9y ago

This sounds like the perfect use case for IPFS.

c517402 9y ago

Government research grants need to require that papers produced are available online for free. This would rapidly change the academic publishing situation.

return0 9y ago
many funding bodies do. but what to do about older papers?
- c517402 9y ago
  Maybe a law reducing the length of copyright on academic papers to a few years.
  - return0 9y ago
    actually thats not a good idea. A paper may already take 1+ year to go from experiment to publication, it should be open for everyone to read immediately to be most useful - science moves fast.

mnm1 9y ago

I fail to see how the injunction is not a violation of the first amendment right of search engines and ISPs to display any legal content they want--and we are talking about legal content here (links). It is clearly improper under DMCA, but it seems to me such injunctions are simply unconstitutional, DMCA or not. Anyone care to explain the twisted logic of the court here?

joliv 9y ago
First, the Court sees Sci-Hub as essentially hosting the copyrighted materials. From the order in ACS v. Does: > ...Sci-Hub has copied elements—and, in many cases, the entirety of—those works, and that Sci-Hub has distributed those works by allowing individuals to download the works from its website, all in violation of the Copyright Act. But to entertain your argument of First Amendment protections, linking to infringing documents is pretty clearly incitement of imminent lawless action as established in Brandenburg.

jancsika 9y ago

Ok IPFS fans, here's your chance. Can you build a better boat?

jklein11 9y ago

Do articles that are published in journals meet some sort of specification? If you find a study that was published in a journal do you automatically find it more credible than a random article you find on the internet? If so, what has the journal done to achieve that credibility. The way I see it, the value academic journals provide is to verify that the study is from a reputable source. It's not the distribution of the articles that you are paying for, it is the curation. Something like Sci-Hub would not be able to exist without the publications first verifying that the studies are legitimate. I know very little about the world of academic publishing, so I'm not sure if my take on this situation is totally off.

drtillberg 9y ago

It is not obvious to me that the judge intended to order worldwide ISPs unaffiliated with sci-hub to block all traffic to sci-hub. Seems still to be referring to sci-hub's ISP. The reference to search engines is odd, though. Hypothetically, a search engine indexes documents from that court case, and the documents name the address of the outlaw website. Does that violate the order?