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I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is you

by bcook 11y ago

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

ska 11y ago
The issues surrounding scientific publication are much more nuanced than that. Did you read the article?
- bcook 11y ago
  I did, but with so few comments I thought I would pose a question directly related to piracy, rather than the precise topic in the article.
  - j-pb 11y ago
    Torrenting movie is piracy, this is making something accessible to the public that has been paid for by said public to begin with. Publishers are the ones doing the stealing (yes stealing not piracy, because piracy at least leaves the original accessible).
gue5t 11y ago
There's no reason to assume a priori that an act is immoral. The primary criterion for an act to be immoral tends to be that it makes someone else's life worse. There is no direct effect of piracy on the author of a work. There is no physical carrier particle for piracy, and no sense organ for "being pirated"; pain receptors do not immediately fire. The indirect effects may include decreased numbers of purchases of copies of that work, unauthorized derivative works being created, people experiencing the work that would not have been able to otherwise, and so on. It is not obvious to me that the net sum of these is negative (or positive, for that matter), so the question becomes: why do I think it's permissible to expose the author of a work to these indirect effects? We need a moral understanding of the world to answer this question. Traditionally we start with notions like property and autonomy: you can't take someone's stuff, and you can't force someone to do something, or manipulate their body without their consent. However, a piece of data is not property; it's an idea. This is evident when we look at simple data, such as the numbers 0, 1, or 2. They're mathematical concepts. Then we can look at bigger numbers, such as the AACS key, 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640. Any cutoff at which we might decide numbers stop being ideas and start being something else (such as property) would be utterly arbitrary, and the goal of our morality is to be just, not arbitrary. Thus, if we want to make it impermissible to pirate files, we have to make it permissibile to censor ideas. Western society generally has come to consensus that censorship is impermissible except, some hold, in cases involving deep physical or emotional harm or suffering, such as child abuse. It seems clear that the indirect effects of piracy do not fall into this category, so these objectors need not be concerned. The real worst-case indirect effect is destitution (starving on the street), and Western morality does not compel one to prevent destitution. You can even look at the notion of "competition" in the market as encouraging one to indirectly work toward the destitution of our competitors, and view piracy as a competitor in the market for copies of the work. Even for those who truly consider it unacceptable to let someone go destitute (who might also argue the immorality of capitalism), it's possible to engage in piracy while working to prevent eventual destitution of creators through other means. Traditionally in these arguments one then moves the goalposts from moral permissibility to desirability, saying that "although we consider it technically OK to pirate, mustn't we agree that it's not the optimal behavior?". For one thing, you've already "lost the argument" by moving the goalposts. But if we look at this as an attempt to, rather than pick a winner for an Internet fight, come to a more comprehensive understanding of the world, it is clear why this question immediately comes to mind. People are worried that we'll starve our artists and musicians and authors and programmers, or have to subsist on what little art, literature, and software we can skim off of independently wealthy authors, crowdfunding, and preorders. They see the creative output of the current world and worry we're going to change circumstances in such a way that makes that level and quality of output impossible. My answer to this concern is that there's a huge amount of creative work being done right now that is illegal, and operates via happily evading enforcement. Even the portion of this that is legal, protected by "fair use" clauses or licensing agreements not converted into machine-readable form, is often deleted by automated systems which cannot process intent; this happens widely on YouTube. There's another large category of creative work that is simply not done out of fear of breaking copyright laws. This is every TV show that ever failed to win licensing rights, and a bajillion pieces of unwritten software; this is unreleased albums rotting in archives because samples couldn't be cleared to release them. It is not justifiable to short these authors and works, who are being censored now, for the sake of those who wield copyright and censorship as silencing weapons. I do not have the hard numbers (and honestly this is not a numerical question) to say the world would be more musical, literarily richer, or have better software without copyright. If this is a question that can be objectively answered, I can't exclude that its answer may be negative. But I do have an argument that says the only ethical option is for us to move toward inhabiting that world.
- acveilleux 11y ago
  When the resource being abused by sci-hub (a university's ezproxy server, via a hacked or shared user account) is shut down by publisher locking out a whole university because an account downloaded 10000 papers over a week-end, there is a real loss. It is not a theoretical moral quandary. Obviously, the loss is kind of abstract for the publisher but it isn't for the small college that spends half or more of its annual acquisition budget on journal subscriptions and is then locked out of what it spent tens or hundreds of thousands on (depending strictly on which publisher locked them out until they can demonstrate that abuse as been shut down.) Sure, if you're Hardvard or Stanford library, you can play hardball with the publisher and get your access restored immediately but if you're a small institution, someone's week in the library just got ruined to satisfy the platform owner that abuse has been shut down... For now. It really hurts the small institutions who can least afford it.
  - jononor 11y ago
    Why ruined? Can't they just use sci-hub to do their research? ;)
    - acveilleux 11y ago
      That doesn't help the poor librarian that will now spend 3 days going back and forth with the platform while the front desk has to explain to the various users why they cannot get their articles from Journals for which the library already has a subscription.
khedoros 11y ago
When I did it on a regular basis? "I want it, and I know how to get it without negative consequences.". It's no moral justification, but neither is "I'm poor".
- bcook 11y ago
  I agree, but I think "I'm poor" is better than "I want". Neither completely justifies.
  - namlem 11y ago
    "I'm poor" is only better if you intend to go back and pay for it when you can afford to.
    - bcook 11y ago
      That is illogical. Your comparison implies that the "rich" pirate eventually pays.
jacobolus 11y ago
If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’s easy to skim 100 papers in a couple days, trying to figure out which ones are relevant and which ones aren’t. Paying $3000 just to sort through and find the 5 out of 100 papers which bear closer scrutiny is very expensive, even for someone who isn’t “financially struggling”. (No, the abstracts alone aren’t sufficient for this.) And it’s not clear that the money is going anywhere useful. The scientists who wrote the papers never make a profit: all the money goes to a couple of rich corporations, who will use the money to further impede scientific progress.
- saidajigumi 11y ago
  Researching a topic, it’s easy to skim 100 papers in a couple days This, a thousand times. Compounded with the problems of research quality and legitimacy that this essay highlights, it's even worse than looking for mere "relevance". Many published papers are outright dross, serving as filler that further increases the power of a $30-$45/paper paywall.
- return0 11y ago
  >all the money goes to a couple of rich corporations, who will use the money to further impede scientific progress More problematic , the three major publishers are in UK, netherlands and US, which means the rest of the world's scientists donate their science to make these publishers richer.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  arXiv? I mean, you're looking at preprints, and you might have a higher dross-to-gold ratio, but can't you do your research there, without the moral dilemma?
  - return0 11y ago
    has almost zero life sciences content
kinghajj 11y ago
Fundamentally, I take an economic perspective: the supply of any piece information is now effectively unbounded, so the price trend sharply to zero. That it hasn't is due to artificial market manipulations, which don't concern me.
eikenberry 11y ago
The article addresses this quite well... "In the face of multinational, highly profitable corporations citing mere copyright when human rights (“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”) are at stake, civil disobedience of the kind Sci-Hub is a great example of, becomes a societal imperative."
- bcook 11y ago
  The article addresses a certain (popular) perspective, not the only perspective. I agree, papers should be cheaper, but should they be universally free via sci-hub... I dunno.
  - gknoy 11y ago
    If tax payers fund its construction, it's a bit ludicrous to suggest that they should be unable to reap any benefit from it, especially when the purpose of much research is for the public good.
    - bcook 11y ago
      So, only the citizens who fund the research should have access? That, just like the current high-prices, excludes poor countries/people from access.
      - dalke 11y ago
        It doesn't necessarily imply that. Suppose something is funded by US taxes. It could be harder to restrict access to only citizens than to make it available to the world. For example, should a US citizen who is overseas (eg, on a 6 month sabbatical) be able to access the system? Or it could be that only downloads from the geographic US are allowed, but further distribution is not prohibited. Consider an existing journal article written by a US government employees. That work is in the public domain. It is not possible to infringe on the copyright ("pirate") the paper because there is no copyright protection, and in the US there is no "sweat-of-the-brow" protection for non-creative additions like OCR'ed text added to the PDF. I think it would be an excellent test case to take all of the papers from sci-hub, extract those where the author is a government employee, and have a "public domain sci-hub" version containing only public domain articles. The lawyer bill would be rather high, so I'm not going to do it. You would likely also have to show that you were actively filtering out papers which weren't in the public domain, and of course reply to DMCA. I can't figure out a business model which would support that. Still, I think YouTube and similar sites show that such a site is not fundamentally illegal.
return0 11y ago
Pirating a movie will probably not save someone's life, however access to knowledge by the right scientist can do that. Do not conflate that with the more general piracy issue. The way these journals work is basically coercion: scientists are kept in a loop where they have to publish in the traditional journals because that's what gets the funding, and the funding sources use the same system because they (haven't bothered to create another|are afraid to|are lazy). To top it all, university libraries are forced to pay exorbitant annual fees to access the articles that their own staff wrote, corrected and reviewed for free (they even do the pictures for them). And all this is running on taxpayer money, yet the journals don't report to anyone. It's a mad system if you think about it.
- bcook 11y ago
  So, any knowledge that could save a life should be freely available? I like the idea, but I think the situation is not that simple. Although you make a good point that piracy of one thing may be dissimilar to piracy of another thing, both acts are still considered piracy. That is why I asked a question about generic piracy.
  - return0 11y ago
    > So, any knowledge that could save a life should be freely available? its not free. taxpayers have paid for it (and are not getting it for aforementioned reasons)
    - bcook 11y ago
      Then give me your credit card information, because I have no health insurance and it has been 5 years since my last checkup. Edit: The parent's reply was "yes" when I replied. Edit2: I am unsure which "free" you are referring to. Maybe all knowledge should be "libre", but I hesitate to say all knowledge should be "gratis".
    - dalke 11y ago
      Some papers were written by self-employed people or by corporate employees. Is it okay for these papers to be restricted?
nemothekid 11y ago
"I am poor" is a poor moral justification to pirate software, movies & books. Software, movies and books are written and funded by private individuals, and if you are pirating entertainment its wrong. I'm not the moral police, but "I'm poor" isn't a very good excuse. The stand I take with Scientific Papers is much different - these papers are backed by institutions which are commonly tax-payer funded or non-profits. As a citizen, you have already paid for the funding of this research and not being able to access that data doesn't seem fair. It's like if you paid, before hand, to see a movie created, but never allowed to watch it.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  "I paid, before hand, to have a movie created, but was never allowed to watch it (for free)" isn't actually all that great a moral justification for pirating a movie, either. But in the case of creating a movie, if I paid to make it happen, first the creators would probably invite me to the first screening, and second, even if they didn't, I could afford to buy a ticket. Scientific research, on the other hand, is paid for, not by "me", but by "us" - by the pooled tax money of millions of people. I, as an individual, do not have the money to "buy a ticket" to all the research that we, as a group, have paid for. What really needs to happen is that we, the taxpayers, put pressure on the government to insist that all government-supported research publish the results for free online somewhere.
  - thatcat 11y ago
    >taxpayers should insist that government research publish results for free Publishing in open journals costs significantly more (on the magnitude of thousands per paper) so this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding.
    - SquidLord 11y ago
      That is a significant and incredibly poorly defended assertion that you're making there, sir. Given that there are dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of open journals, many of which are heavily digitally based, well tied with distributed storage, and willing to work with any significant publication – the claim that "this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding" doesn't even pass the first smell test. You don't just get to assert things without support. That's not only not good science, it's terrible argumentation.
petra 11y ago
Morally, societies are much better when they are equal.
tomp 11y ago
Most answers only touch the issue of piracy of scientific articles, but let me answer your more general question. I believe that copyright is immoral, hence "piracy", for me, requires no further moral justification. Copyright is a racket, established by rent-seeking, mostly unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. It's a cartel/monopoly that discourages market competition, one of the most important inventions in history. The only connection between copyright and theft that I see is that by extending copyright retroactively, politicians (and their corporate sponsors) are stealing from the public domain. most importantly, copyright does little-to-nothing to encourage creativity and likely even prevents it. I see it as an obstacle to progress. I wouldn't necessarily oppose a limited copyright term (14-20 years seems plenty), but I completely oppose the current regime. However, I still often pay for media (after having pirated it and confirmed its value) to support the author(s).
- deepsun 11y ago
  I would let content creator to decide what to do with his creation. I believe the author can do anything with it. For example, burn it, or set a price of $100500 per bit of information, and require customers to crawl on their knees ingratiatingly asking to buy it. Of course, no one would buy it that way, but author has ultimate right on his/her creation. One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right.
  - mcphage 11y ago
    > One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. > I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right. It may be the creator's right, but it isn't necessarily the creator's will. There are a lot of reasons to publish in particular journals, and restricted access to the published paper isn't necessarily the desired effect, it may just be an unfortunate side effect.
  - dineshp2 11y ago
    Respectfully disagree. There is an implicit acceptance of the current copyright system and the laws regarding copyright as it stands, in your comment. Look at the big picture, we have created a society that thrives on imposing artificial restrictions on everyone and the only people who benefit from it are big corporations. By giving complete rights over the invention to the inventor or a corporation, we are limiting the potential impact of the invention. Instead if access to such knowledge is made freely available, the possibilities are endless. What if Sir Tim Berners-Lee patented the World Wide Web and monetized it?
Obi_Juan_Kenobi 11y ago
A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic. If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive. In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them. And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn't. So, simply putting together a manuscript would cost on the order of $5,000-10,000. In actual practice, this is something like a month of searching and reading papers. To sustain that rate is obviously impractical. This makes those without institutional access completely deprived of useful access to the world's research. It's a terrible, indefensible situation.
- bcook 11y ago
  We argue about the background color of a linked article with little resistance, so I think a post about general piracy within an article about academic piracy is relatively on-topic (but I know that is subjective). I agree that the current journal/paper fee is crazy, but to say that piracy is the "obvious" answer is short-sighted, in my opinion. I very much enjoy the conversation though. My experience with academia is very limited, but I happily used sci-hub & libgen when I was researching the Hierarchical Fair Service Curve paper.
- dalke 11y ago
  > In writing a publication ... And then the reviewer says "you should compare this to papers X, Y, and Z", each of which costs $35+ for a non-subscriber to read.
fiatjaf 11y ago
Who's not poor here? I have many material goods and earn a lot of money, but I have thousands of debt. I am poor by a lot of criteria. You're not, because you have everything you want by stealing it, you self-declared pirate.
- bcook 11y ago
  I was assuming that "poor" was defined as approximately equal to or below the USA's poverty line. https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FPL/ https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FP... What criteria do you default to when defining the "poor" class?
  - fiatjaf 11y ago
    You assume too much. Remember that you assume that being poor allows you to break any moral principle.
    - bcook 11y ago
      I surely assume too much. Your assumption that I am morally unimpeded because I am poor is wrong though. By assuming too much about me I am glad to see that you understand irony.
namlem 11y ago
For stuff like games and shows I generally pay, but these scientific articles are not like entertainment media. I would argue that it is the journals who are the pirates, and not the people downloading the articles. The scientists who do the research do not get paid for these articles. The peer reviewers also do not get paid, they work for free. The journals are 100% rent seeking. Much of this research was paid for by taxes too, which makes it even more insidious.
namlem 11y ago
For stuff like games and shows I generally pay, but these scientific articles are not like entertainment media. I would argue that it is the journals who are the pirates, and not the people downloading the articles. The scientists who do the research do not get paid for these articles. The peer reviewers also do not get paid, they work for free. The journals are 100% rent seeking. Much of this research was paid for by taxes too, which makes it even more insidious.
namlem 11y ago
For stuff like games and shows I generally pay, but these scientific articles are not like entertainment media. I would argue that it is the journals who are the pirates, and not the people downloading the articles. The scientists who do the research do not get paid for these articles. The peer reviewers also do not get paid, they work for free. The journals are 100% rent seeking. Much of this research was paid for by taxes too, which makes it even more insidious.
eggy 11y ago
Poor is not a 'moral justification' for anything. I believe in open access, but I heed the if 'I can justify a lie, I can justify murder', the proverbial 'slippery slope' of ethics. I grew up poor, and I did not use it as a justification to breech any of my moral principles. While I agree the exorbitant pricing, and pay walling do not benefit the world, do not develop newer business models as technology progresses, I also recognize that even running a server out of my closet costs money - the server, electricity, etc... I always wonder how the information for free model works? Bitcoin mining consumes a lot of electricity; it's not just a few bits on an energy-free system. Who ultimately hosts OA materials, and pays the ongoing costs, donations?
- chippy 11y ago
  > Poor is not a 'moral justification' for anything. I believe it actually is, morally speaking, but it's just not a very good one in this example.
scotty79 11y ago
Here's some: 1. Paying for information is immoral. You don't want to make withholding information from you profitable for people. You don't want to encourage this kind of behavior. 2. When I wan't to play a game or watch a movie I want to do just that. I don't want to play "decide if the thing's worth the price". It's tiresome and unnecessary. 3. In most cases I wouldn't want to consume the information I'm pirating if my information environment haven't been polluted by advertisement to make me want the thing. You pushed some information on me that I haven't sought without paying me for the use of my brain so I won't pay you for the information you are trying to sell. 4. Some software is priced at levels directed at corporations. Entities whose income levels vastly exceed their sanity. I'm individual. I can't afford that even if I'm rich for an individual. I still want to check out your software and maybe even use 5% of it's capabilities. I won't restrict myself just because you haven't thought how to satisfy me, neither I'll require that you think about me. 5. I'm a student. You'll get your money from the corporations that will hire me after I learn your software. Isn't that why you push your software in my school? 6. No. I won't play "pick the correct version/licence" so I can get the software as individual, student, scientist, whomever... I won't fill registration form. I'll just pirate the full version. It's easier and I don't want to stumble at artificial barriers. 7. Sharing is caring. I won't withhold the information I have from my friends especially if it effortless to share. I'll happily use information shared by my friends. 8. Business is trying to manufacture morality around copyright. "you wouldn't steal a bear.." and such. Listerine made you think your breath stinks. Flushable wipes people told you flushable wipes are necessary for you and flushable... Enough is enough. They can't be allowed to tamper with definition of theft. 9. Copyright makes lawyers flock to software. Lawyers tax everything they flock to. You should do anything you can to make lawyers move somewhere else or better yet stop being lawyers. 10. Copyright makes creativity very hard. You can't remix things without thinking "Do I have right to do that?" Not many people object to giving credit where credit is due. Many are prevented from acting by unknown, potentially exorbitant price they could pay for creating something that uses thing they took from internet. This kind of poisons creativity for a lot of people. ... I guess I'm out. Any other creative moral justifications? Or what are the moral justifications of not pirating software (beyond the obvious, creatives should be rewarded for they creation, and bit more sketchy, investors should get return on their investment)?

by bcook 11y ago

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

ska 11y ago

The issues surrounding scientific publication are much more nuanced than that. Did you read the article?

bcook 11y ago
I did, but with so few comments I thought I would pose a question directly related to piracy, rather than the precise topic in the article.
- j-pb 11y ago
  Torrenting movie is piracy, this is making something accessible to the public that has been paid for by said public to begin with. Publishers are the ones doing the stealing (yes stealing not piracy, because piracy at least leaves the original accessible).

gue5t 11y ago

There's no reason to assume a priori that an act is immoral. The primary criterion for an act to be immoral tends to be that it makes someone else's life worse. There is no direct effect of piracy on the author of a work. There is no physical carrier particle for piracy, and no sense organ for "being pirated"; pain receptors do not immediately fire. The indirect effects may include decreased numbers of purchases of copies of that work, unauthorized derivative works being created, people experiencing the work that would not have been able to otherwise, and so on. It is not obvious to me that the net sum of these is negative (or positive, for that matter), so the question becomes: why do I think it's permissible to expose the author of a work to these indirect effects? We need a moral understanding of the world to answer this question. Traditionally we start with notions like property and autonomy: you can't take someone's stuff, and you can't force someone to do something, or manipulate their body without their consent. However, a piece of data is not property; it's an idea. This is evident when we look at simple data, such as the numbers 0, 1, or 2. They're mathematical concepts. Then we can look at bigger numbers, such as the AACS key, 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640. Any cutoff at which we might decide numbers stop being ideas and start being something else (such as property) would be utterly arbitrary, and the goal of our morality is to be just, not arbitrary. Thus, if we want to make it impermissible to pirate files, we have to make it permissibile to censor ideas. Western society generally has come to consensus that censorship is impermissible except, some hold, in cases involving deep physical or emotional harm or suffering, such as child abuse. It seems clear that the indirect effects of piracy do not fall into this category, so these objectors need not be concerned. The real worst-case indirect effect is destitution (starving on the street), and Western morality does not compel one to prevent destitution. You can even look at the notion of "competition" in the market as encouraging one to indirectly work toward the destitution of our competitors, and view piracy as a competitor in the market for copies of the work. Even for those who truly consider it unacceptable to let someone go destitute (who might also argue the immorality of capitalism), it's possible to engage in piracy while working to prevent eventual destitution of creators through other means. Traditionally in these arguments one then moves the goalposts from moral permissibility to desirability, saying that "although we consider it technically OK to pirate, mustn't we agree that it's not the optimal behavior?". For one thing, you've already "lost the argument" by moving the goalposts. But if we look at this as an attempt to, rather than pick a winner for an Internet fight, come to a more comprehensive understanding of the world, it is clear why this question immediately comes to mind. People are worried that we'll starve our artists and musicians and authors and programmers, or have to subsist on what little art, literature, and software we can skim off of independently wealthy authors, crowdfunding, and preorders. They see the creative output of the current world and worry we're going to change circumstances in such a way that makes that level and quality of output impossible. My answer to this concern is that there's a huge amount of creative work being done right now that is illegal, and operates via happily evading enforcement. Even the portion of this that is legal, protected by "fair use" clauses or licensing agreements not converted into machine-readable form, is often deleted by automated systems which cannot process intent; this happens widely on YouTube. There's another large category of creative work that is simply not done out of fear of breaking copyright laws. This is every TV show that ever failed to win licensing rights, and a bajillion pieces of unwritten software; this is unreleased albums rotting in archives because samples couldn't be cleared to release them. It is not justifiable to short these authors and works, who are being censored now, for the sake of those who wield copyright and censorship as silencing weapons. I do not have the hard numbers (and honestly this is not a numerical question) to say the world would be more musical, literarily richer, or have better software without copyright. If this is a question that can be objectively answered, I can't exclude that its answer may be negative. But I do have an argument that says the only ethical option is for us to move toward inhabiting that world.

acveilleux 11y ago
When the resource being abused by sci-hub (a university's ezproxy server, via a hacked or shared user account) is shut down by publisher locking out a whole university because an account downloaded 10000 papers over a week-end, there is a real loss. It is not a theoretical moral quandary. Obviously, the loss is kind of abstract for the publisher but it isn't for the small college that spends half or more of its annual acquisition budget on journal subscriptions and is then locked out of what it spent tens or hundreds of thousands on (depending strictly on which publisher locked them out until they can demonstrate that abuse as been shut down.) Sure, if you're Hardvard or Stanford library, you can play hardball with the publisher and get your access restored immediately but if you're a small institution, someone's week in the library just got ruined to satisfy the platform owner that abuse has been shut down... For now. It really hurts the small institutions who can least afford it.
- jononor 11y ago
  Why ruined? Can't they just use sci-hub to do their research? ;)
  - acveilleux 11y ago
    That doesn't help the poor librarian that will now spend 3 days going back and forth with the platform while the front desk has to explain to the various users why they cannot get their articles from Journals for which the library already has a subscription.

khedoros 11y ago

When I did it on a regular basis? "I want it, and I know how to get it without negative consequences.". It's no moral justification, but neither is "I'm poor".

bcook 11y ago
I agree, but I think "I'm poor" is better than "I want". Neither completely justifies.
- namlem 11y ago
  "I'm poor" is only better if you intend to go back and pay for it when you can afford to.
  - bcook 11y ago
    That is illogical. Your comparison implies that the "rich" pirate eventually pays.

jacobolus 11y ago

If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’s easy to skim 100 papers in a couple days, trying to figure out which ones are relevant and which ones aren’t. Paying $3000 just to sort through and find the 5 out of 100 papers which bear closer scrutiny is very expensive, even for someone who isn’t “financially struggling”. (No, the abstracts alone aren’t sufficient for this.) And it’s not clear that the money is going anywhere useful. The scientists who wrote the papers never make a profit: all the money goes to a couple of rich corporations, who will use the money to further impede scientific progress.

saidajigumi 11y ago
Researching a topic, it’s easy to skim 100 papers in a couple days This, a thousand times. Compounded with the problems of research quality and legitimacy that this essay highlights, it's even worse than looking for mere "relevance". Many published papers are outright dross, serving as filler that further increases the power of a $30-$45/paper paywall.
return0 11y ago
>all the money goes to a couple of rich corporations, who will use the money to further impede scientific progress More problematic , the three major publishers are in UK, netherlands and US, which means the rest of the world's scientists donate their science to make these publishers richer.
AnimalMuppet 11y ago
arXiv? I mean, you're looking at preprints, and you might have a higher dross-to-gold ratio, but can't you do your research there, without the moral dilemma?
- return0 11y ago
  has almost zero life sciences content

kinghajj 11y ago

Fundamentally, I take an economic perspective: the supply of any piece information is now effectively unbounded, so the price trend sharply to zero. That it hasn't is due to artificial market manipulations, which don't concern me.

eikenberry 11y ago

The article addresses this quite well... "In the face of multinational, highly profitable corporations citing mere copyright when human rights (“Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”) are at stake, civil disobedience of the kind Sci-Hub is a great example of, becomes a societal imperative."

bcook 11y ago
The article addresses a certain (popular) perspective, not the only perspective. I agree, papers should be cheaper, but should they be universally free via sci-hub... I dunno.
- gknoy 11y ago
  If tax payers fund its construction, it's a bit ludicrous to suggest that they should be unable to reap any benefit from it, especially when the purpose of much research is for the public good.
  - bcook 11y ago
    So, only the citizens who fund the research should have access? That, just like the current high-prices, excludes poor countries/people from access.
    - dalke 11y ago
      It doesn't necessarily imply that. Suppose something is funded by US taxes. It could be harder to restrict access to only citizens than to make it available to the world. For example, should a US citizen who is overseas (eg, on a 6 month sabbatical) be able to access the system? Or it could be that only downloads from the geographic US are allowed, but further distribution is not prohibited. Consider an existing journal article written by a US government employees. That work is in the public domain. It is not possible to infringe on the copyright ("pirate") the paper because there is no copyright protection, and in the US there is no "sweat-of-the-brow" protection for non-creative additions like OCR'ed text added to the PDF. I think it would be an excellent test case to take all of the papers from sci-hub, extract those where the author is a government employee, and have a "public domain sci-hub" version containing only public domain articles. The lawyer bill would be rather high, so I'm not going to do it. You would likely also have to show that you were actively filtering out papers which weren't in the public domain, and of course reply to DMCA. I can't figure out a business model which would support that. Still, I think YouTube and similar sites show that such a site is not fundamentally illegal.

return0 11y ago

Pirating a movie will probably not save someone's life, however access to knowledge by the right scientist can do that. Do not conflate that with the more general piracy issue. The way these journals work is basically coercion: scientists are kept in a loop where they have to publish in the traditional journals because that's what gets the funding, and the funding sources use the same system because they (haven't bothered to create another|are afraid to|are lazy). To top it all, university libraries are forced to pay exorbitant annual fees to access the articles that their own staff wrote, corrected and reviewed for free (they even do the pictures for them). And all this is running on taxpayer money, yet the journals don't report to anyone. It's a mad system if you think about it.

bcook 11y ago
So, any knowledge that could save a life should be freely available? I like the idea, but I think the situation is not that simple. Although you make a good point that piracy of one thing may be dissimilar to piracy of another thing, both acts are still considered piracy. That is why I asked a question about generic piracy.
- return0 11y ago
  > So, any knowledge that could save a life should be freely available? its not free. taxpayers have paid for it (and are not getting it for aforementioned reasons)
  - bcook 11y ago
    Then give me your credit card information, because I have no health insurance and it has been 5 years since my last checkup. Edit: The parent's reply was "yes" when I replied. Edit2: I am unsure which "free" you are referring to. Maybe all knowledge should be "libre", but I hesitate to say all knowledge should be "gratis".
  - dalke 11y ago
    Some papers were written by self-employed people or by corporate employees. Is it okay for these papers to be restricted?

nemothekid 11y ago

"I am poor" is a poor moral justification to pirate software, movies & books. Software, movies and books are written and funded by private individuals, and if you are pirating entertainment its wrong. I'm not the moral police, but "I'm poor" isn't a very good excuse. The stand I take with Scientific Papers is much different - these papers are backed by institutions which are commonly tax-payer funded or non-profits. As a citizen, you have already paid for the funding of this research and not being able to access that data doesn't seem fair. It's like if you paid, before hand, to see a movie created, but never allowed to watch it.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
"I paid, before hand, to have a movie created, but was never allowed to watch it (for free)" isn't actually all that great a moral justification for pirating a movie, either. But in the case of creating a movie, if I paid to make it happen, first the creators would probably invite me to the first screening, and second, even if they didn't, I could afford to buy a ticket. Scientific research, on the other hand, is paid for, not by "me", but by "us" - by the pooled tax money of millions of people. I, as an individual, do not have the money to "buy a ticket" to all the research that we, as a group, have paid for. What really needs to happen is that we, the taxpayers, put pressure on the government to insist that all government-supported research publish the results for free online somewhere.
- thatcat 11y ago
  >taxpayers should insist that government research publish results for free Publishing in open journals costs significantly more (on the magnitude of thousands per paper) so this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding.
  - SquidLord 11y ago
    That is a significant and incredibly poorly defended assertion that you're making there, sir. Given that there are dozens if not hundreds (possibly thousands) of open journals, many of which are heavily digitally based, well tied with distributed storage, and willing to work with any significant publication – the claim that "this plan would likely require significant amounts of additional funding" doesn't even pass the first smell test. You don't just get to assert things without support. That's not only not good science, it's terrible argumentation.

petra 11y ago

Morally, societies are much better when they are equal.

tomp 11y ago

Most answers only touch the issue of piracy of scientific articles, but let me answer your more general question. I believe that copyright is immoral, hence "piracy", for me, requires no further moral justification. Copyright is a racket, established by rent-seeking, mostly unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. It's a cartel/monopoly that discourages market competition, one of the most important inventions in history. The only connection between copyright and theft that I see is that by extending copyright retroactively, politicians (and their corporate sponsors) are stealing from the public domain. most importantly, copyright does little-to-nothing to encourage creativity and likely even prevents it. I see it as an obstacle to progress. I wouldn't necessarily oppose a limited copyright term (14-20 years seems plenty), but I completely oppose the current regime. However, I still often pay for media (after having pirated it and confirmed its value) to support the author(s).

deepsun 11y ago
I would let content creator to decide what to do with his creation. I believe the author can do anything with it. For example, burn it, or set a price of $100500 per bit of information, and require customers to crawl on their knees ingratiatingly asking to buy it. Of course, no one would buy it that way, but author has ultimate right on his/her creation. One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right.
- mcphage 11y ago
  > One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. > I pirate too, but I respect the ultimate creator's right. It may be the creator's right, but it isn't necessarily the creator's will. There are a lot of reasons to publish in particular journals, and restricted access to the published paper isn't necessarily the desired effect, it may just be an unfortunate side effect.
- dineshp2 11y ago
  Respectfully disagree. There is an implicit acceptance of the current copyright system and the laws regarding copyright as it stands, in your comment. Look at the big picture, we have created a society that thrives on imposing artificial restrictions on everyone and the only people who benefit from it are big corporations. By giving complete rights over the invention to the inventor or a corporation, we are limiting the potential impact of the invention. Instead if access to such knowledge is made freely available, the possibilities are endless. What if Sir Tim Berners-Lee patented the World Wide Web and monetized it?

Obi_Juan_Kenobi 11y ago

A general discussion about piracy seems very off-topic. If we're talking just about scientific articles, the need for piracy is obvious; without institutional access to journals, proper research of a subject is ludicrously expensive. In writing a publication, I generally use about 50-100 citations, and yes, you actually have to read them. And for every one that you did use, there are one or two that you didn't. So, simply putting together a manuscript would cost on the order of $5,000-10,000. In actual practice, this is something like a month of searching and reading papers. To sustain that rate is obviously impractical. This makes those without institutional access completely deprived of useful access to the world's research. It's a terrible, indefensible situation.

bcook 11y ago
We argue about the background color of a linked article with little resistance, so I think a post about general piracy within an article about academic piracy is relatively on-topic (but I know that is subjective). I agree that the current journal/paper fee is crazy, but to say that piracy is the "obvious" answer is short-sighted, in my opinion. I very much enjoy the conversation though. My experience with academia is very limited, but I happily used sci-hub & libgen when I was researching the Hierarchical Fair Service Curve paper.
dalke 11y ago
> In writing a publication ... And then the reviewer says "you should compare this to papers X, Y, and Z", each of which costs $35+ for a non-subscriber to read.

fiatjaf 11y ago

Who's not poor here? I have many material goods and earn a lot of money, but I have thousands of debt. I am poor by a lot of criteria. You're not, because you have everything you want by stealing it, you self-declared pirate.

bcook 11y ago
I was assuming that "poor" was defined as approximately equal to or below the USA's poverty line. https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FPL/ https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FP... What criteria do you default to when defining the "poor" class?
- fiatjaf 11y ago
  You assume too much. Remember that you assume that being poor allows you to break any moral principle.
  - bcook 11y ago
    I surely assume too much. Your assumption that I am morally unimpeded because I am poor is wrong though. By assuming too much about me I am glad to see that you understand irony.

namlem 11y ago

For stuff like games and shows I generally pay, but these scientific articles are not like entertainment media. I would argue that it is the journals who are the pirates, and not the people downloading the articles. The scientists who do the research do not get paid for these articles. The peer reviewers also do not get paid, they work for free. The journals are 100% rent seeking. Much of this research was paid for by taxes too, which makes it even more insidious.

namlem 11y ago

eggy 11y ago

Poor is not a 'moral justification' for anything. I believe in open access, but I heed the if 'I can justify a lie, I can justify murder', the proverbial 'slippery slope' of ethics. I grew up poor, and I did not use it as a justification to breech any of my moral principles. While I agree the exorbitant pricing, and pay walling do not benefit the world, do not develop newer business models as technology progresses, I also recognize that even running a server out of my closet costs money - the server, electricity, etc... I always wonder how the information for free model works? Bitcoin mining consumes a lot of electricity; it's not just a few bits on an energy-free system. Who ultimately hosts OA materials, and pays the ongoing costs, donations?

chippy 11y ago
> Poor is not a 'moral justification' for anything. I believe it actually is, morally speaking, but it's just not a very good one in this example.

scotty79 11y ago

Here's some: 1. Paying for information is immoral. You don't want to make withholding information from you profitable for people. You don't want to encourage this kind of behavior. 2. When I wan't to play a game or watch a movie I want to do just that. I don't want to play "decide if the thing's worth the price". It's tiresome and unnecessary. 3. In most cases I wouldn't want to consume the information I'm pirating if my information environment haven't been polluted by advertisement to make me want the thing. You pushed some information on me that I haven't sought without paying me for the use of my brain so I won't pay you for the information you are trying to sell. 4. Some software is priced at levels directed at corporations. Entities whose income levels vastly exceed their sanity. I'm individual. I can't afford that even if I'm rich for an individual. I still want to check out your software and maybe even use 5% of it's capabilities. I won't restrict myself just because you haven't thought how to satisfy me, neither I'll require that you think about me. 5. I'm a student. You'll get your money from the corporations that will hire me after I learn your software. Isn't that why you push your software in my school? 6. No. I won't play "pick the correct version/licence" so I can get the software as individual, student, scientist, whomever... I won't fill registration form. I'll just pirate the full version. It's easier and I don't want to stumble at artificial barriers. 7. Sharing is caring. I won't withhold the information I have from my friends especially if it effortless to share. I'll happily use information shared by my friends. 8. Business is trying to manufacture morality around copyright. "you wouldn't steal a bear.." and such. Listerine made you think your breath stinks. Flushable wipes people told you flushable wipes are necessary for you and flushable... Enough is enough. They can't be allowed to tamper with definition of theft. 9. Copyright makes lawyers flock to software. Lawyers tax everything they flock to. You should do anything you can to make lawyers move somewhere else or better yet stop being lawyers. 10. Copyright makes creativity very hard. You can't remix things without thinking "Do I have right to do that?" Not many people object to giving credit where credit is due. Many are prevented from acting by unknown, potentially exorbitant price they could pay for creating something that uses thing they took from internet. This kind of poisons creativity for a lot of people. ... I guess I'm out. Any other creative moral justifications? Or what are the moral justifications of not pirating software (beyond the obvious, creatives should be rewarded for they creation, and bit more sketchy, investors should get return on their investment)?