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How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its first legal defense team
- anthropodie 5y agoSuppose SciHub looses cases in multiple countries and has to shutdown. What prevents someone from putting entire data as torrent? Piracy is result of unfair prices. Music used to be pirated all the time but then Spotify came along with subscription based services. I don't know anyone who still pirates music. Maybe people with IP and copyright claims should learn from Music industry.
- jhgb 5y ago> What prevents someone from putting entire data as torrent? What do you mean by that? It's already a bunch of torrents on the official SciHub page.
- yashwastaken 5y agoBut pirating music is different from streaming it on some application. Like you don't own the music file you're just streaming it from some servers(in case of downloading you still need the app and can't share it to some other device).
- martin_a 5y agoI don't think that matters. Everybody had a bunch (or thousands) of MP3s because mobile phones weren't a thing, fast mobile connections weren't a thing and there was simply no infrastructure to have something like Spotify. If we'd have Spotify with everything in 2003, we would not swap hard drives in school breaks.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoI was a subscriber to “Yahoo music unlimited” in 2005 and transferred my DRM’d WMA files to a zen micro with a 4GB spinning disc. granted, i never met anyone else at school doing the same thing.
- adamc 5y agoI am not convinced music prices were "unfair" -- they were higher than people wanted to pay. There is a distinction.
- danuker 5y agoWhat is a fair price? There is no such thing. An economically optimal price is one that maximizes total profit. If it's too high, fewer people will buy the product, which might reduce profit. If it's too low, the profit margin will be small in spite of lots of units sold.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> What is a fair price? There is no such thing It's subjective, but that doesn't make it nonexistent. I pay $10/mo. for Spotify. I'm happy with that. I think I get great value for that money spent. If someone came out with an $8/month streaming service, I'd scrutinize it fairly closely before contemplating switching.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> It's subjective, but that doesn't make it nonexistent. Yes, it does. Subjective assessments have no objective reality.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> Subjective assessments have no objective reality Subjective assessments drive political preferences and policy, to say nothing of human relations and experiences.
- dragonwriter 5y agoHallicinations of the expressed wishes of divine figures do that, too. Still doesn't make those figures, or their wishes, real. Beliefs about fair prices exist, fair prices themselves do not.
- caslon 5y agoShutting down isn't actually on the table here. In the best case, she wins. In the worst case, she goes back to her post-USSR nation that doesn't really care about international copyright law and continues to ignore international copyright law.
- creamynebula 5y agoPirating music remains lively on the private tracker scene
- xtracto 5y agoMP3 art shared by napster is different from Knowledge shared by SciHub in that the former was financed privately by record companies while the latter is funded by state taxes (i.e. public money). At the current state of affairs, Scientific Publishers can be reduced as "curators" of public research publications. They may work very well at that (i.e. reading something from Nature, or from JAMA has its prestige) but there is no reason why they should gate the knowledge behind paywalls. They should offer their "curation/selection" services, dedicated to create lists/collections of scientific articles already published elsewhere for free.
- justinator 5y agos/defence/defense/
- cogman10 5y agoThe correct spelling of defen(c|s)e is regional (as are many English words).
- belltaco 5y agoNot really. https://proofreadmyessay.co.uk/writing-tips/spelling-tips-defence-or-defense/ https://proofreadmyessay.co.uk/writing-tips/spelling-tips-de... India uses British English.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoNot all English is American English, in countries influenced by British English defence is often the correct spelling.
- justinator 5y agoThank you, I've been corrected.
- Izikiel43 5y agoAlso, center in british english is centre.
- BoxOfRain 5y agoCaptchas are the worst for this as a native British English speaker since they tend to be automotive, which is an area where British and American English differ wildly. Some are fairly self-explanatory because of how literal the American English terms are (pavement vs sidewalk, zebra crossing vs crosswalk) but some are a bit more arcane (central reservation vs median, bonnet/boot vs hood/trunk).
- rramadass 5y ago>“The way the publishing industry is functioning is unethical. Though what Alexandra Elbakyan is doing is illegal she is countering an industry that is working unethically,” 100% agree with this; Though i would dispute that what she is doing is "illegal". When the deck is completely stacked against you, going outside the rules is not "illegal". Every rational, educated person on this planet should support free access to Knowledge if we are to achieve a fairer, egalitarian society. More power to Sci-Hub, LibGen and their brethren !
- judge2020 5y ago> When the deck is completely stacked against you, going outside the rules is not "illegal". Yes it is. Things are "illegal" when they're in the law book, regardless of which law they're breaking and what they're standing up for.
- frenchy 5y agoIn most places, and certainly in places that practice "common law" and democracy, part of what makes something legal is its moral acceptability. The laws on the books exist to reflect that and to make things function efficiently and fairly. Without that, laws are simply a tool of violence and oppression by the authorities (or the majority, in case of a democracy) against their population. That's why we have juries of peers, and the ability of a jury to say "this person did the thing, but they shouldn't be punished for it".
- salawat 5y agoHence why jury nullification scares the ever loving crap out of the Justice system. Binding precedent is created by the Jury, which throws a wrench into the works that for some reason is seen less acceptable or "official" than a prosecutor exercising prosecutorial discretion.
- gpm 5y agoJury nullification does not create binding precedent.
- godelmachine 5y agoI wish there was a way I could financially support Sci-Hub. The only impediment is they accept cryptocurrency and I am too lazy to get well versed with it. Not forgetting to mention the prices are currently through the roof, and TBH unaffordable for me. But just like I regularly support Wikipedia and USENIX with modest but periodic donations, I would like to support Sci-Hub as well.
- commoner 5y ago> Not forgetting to mention the prices are currently through the roof, and TBH unaffordable for me. Cryptocurrencies are divisible into tiny fractional units, so you don't have to buy a whole unit of a cryptocurrency to use it. While it is a small hassle to convert your currency to cryptocurrency before sending it, if you use an exchange like Coinbase, it's not much harder than transferring money to a different bank/investment account.
- maccard 5y ago> it's not much harder than transferring money to a different bank/investment account. Yes, along with all the KYC requirements that coinbase require, just like my investment account does. Meanwhile the bar for services like Pateron, paypal, shopify, etc is one click and done.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agowhy? what is the "benefit of elsevier"? beyond holding copyright to the work of others which they give away for free, what value addition does elsevier bring to the table that cant be done otherwise? if the argument is that they provide classification and other stuff, why cant you just dump everything on schihub and let people do the organization themselves? remember a few hundred years ago, horse drawn carts were a big business but cars drew them to extinction. should we bring back horse drawn carts monopoly of the old just because they were something once? on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing on scihub directly?
- ausbin 5y ago> on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing on scihub directly? Many compsci/physics/math researchers already submit preprints (or post-prints even) of their papers to arXiv, which is public: https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/. I'm confused, is there a reason why they should they submit to Sci-Hub too?
- Y_Y 5y agoThey're not always quite the same, often arxiv have doesn't updates reflecting changes during the publication process (not including formatting). Can be annoying, the can be subtle differences and people aren't really careful about which versions they use or cite.
- pkaye 5y ago> on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing on scihub directly? Because Elsevier own prestigious journals that authors want to publish on. Its like saying why compete in the Olympics when you can compete in your local races.
- 2Gkashmiri 5y agowhy dont they dual publish or does publishing on elsevier make you forfeit the right to publish elsewhere ? publish on elsevier and simultaneously publish on scihub also? what is the problem in that?
- cheeko1234 5y agoMulti-billion dollar international team of lawyers vs a bunch of young volunteers! I’m rooting for the little guys...
- kbad1000 5y agoHaha, PepsiCo (Lays owner) lost case against farmers who produced the special potatoes in India.