8 ms·

Meet the woman who put 50M stolen articles online (2016)

136 points by Jerry2 10y ago

devoply 10y ago
It's a very very bad idea if you are going to do this sort of thing to attract any media attention or to ever talk to them about anything, much less let them take a picture of you.
- andreyf 10y ago
  Why?
  - delinka 10y ago
    Because it paints a nice target upon which the gatekeepers can set law enforcement.
  - aklemm 10y ago
    Have you heard the story of Aaron Swartz? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
    - aklemm 10y ago
      Weird down-votes against the Aaron Swartz example. Explain yourself.
      - GuiA 10y ago
        Same thing happened to mine, which I seem to have posted at the same time as yours. Don't sweat it, HN is full of salty people.
  - GuiA 10y ago
    Check out what happened to the last guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
    - andreyf 10y ago
      Well, it makes it pretty darn obvious now that Aaron's prosecution was related to his political activities and aspirations, no? I know Aaron didn't like this cynical interpretation of the judicial system, but it seems difficult to argue against it now...
- gwern 10y ago
  Most of the coverage appears to've started after the indictment and other legal problems caught up with Libgen. Once they've started, waging a PR fight helps.
  - ivv 10y ago
    Not sure if there's a difference, but I've always thought that her site is SciHub, not Libgen?
    - XaspR8d 10y ago
      Yes, she runs Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub eventually partnered with LibGen to help host files and reduce Sci-Hub's dependence on donated logins. (Previously all documents were accessed from their "real" journal/repository portals using credentials contributed by sympathetic academics.)
- XaspR8d 10y ago
  I think she has been publicly linked to Sci-Hub for a long time; by the time of the Elsevier lawsuit they knew to contact her directly.[1] Considering that she's already hiding from extradition, a little more PR probably doesn't hurt? [1] - http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2015cv04282/442951/53/ http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york...
offa 10y ago
Upvoting because I'm interested in the discussion of the ethics surrounding 'leaking' scientific papers out into the Web, not so much in this particular case itself but as a general sort of act. HN, what is your opinion on all this?
- krapp 10y ago
  All scientific research should be freely available to the public, without reservation or condition. I have my reservations about leaking political or classified information in some cases, because as Wikileaks has demonstrated, leaks can be used to push a political agenda, rather than serve the cause of unbiased truth. But scientific knowledge benefits the progress of humanity as a whole - the truth doesn't have a political agenda, although it certainly can discredit political axioms. Trying to keep it contained, controlled or limit its access to a select few should be considered a crime against humanity.
  - HeavenBanned 10y ago
    >All scientific research should be freely available to the public, without reservation or condition. Even scientific research on how to build a functional nuclear bomb?
    - dublinben 10y ago
      That information is harmless without the resources to do anything with it. Nonproliferation is targeted at resources, not information for this very reason.
      - aburan28 10y ago
        Exactly why the Iranian nuclear deal seeks to prevent access to the materials needed to build a bomb in a breakout period not the information
    - krapp 10y ago
      Yes, I think so. That research is already public or available on the black market anyway, and the US built the first nuclear bomb ~70 years ago, so it's kind of a moot point. But what would the alternative be? That only the governments which discover how to build a nuclear bomb understand how it works and what its effects are, and get to threaten the rest of the world with impunity? I'm not certain that would be better than the world where everyone at least understands the underlying science, even if not everyone can build one.
pigscantfly 10y ago
Gratuitous misquoting by the Independent here: "But she also acknowledges that some passwords were obtained using the kind of phishing methods that hackers use to dupe people out of financial information." based on the quote "It may be well possible that phished passwords ended up being used at Sci-Hub. I did not send any phishing emails to anyone myself." I don't understand how an editor at a major publication allows claims/spin like this with no concrete evidence unless they are explicitly pushing an agenda (I agree that phishing is at least probable in this case; it also may be an excuse to protect those in the password database if it's ever leaked). Wholly fact-based media seems impossible to find these days.
- branchless 10y ago
  UK newspapers are dying: http://imgur.com/NJ4F8Tt.jpg http://imgur.com/NJ4F8Tt.jpg I suspect if you cut out the number the Independent hand out for free via hotels it would be even worse. I think now they don't even have a physical edition? These guys must pay next to nothing and demand articles that get "eyeballs", produced in little time. Plus all are captive to their main advertisers: cars, banks, realtors. Why not just read blogs?
  - danso 10y ago
    FWIW, this story did not originally come from the Independent. It was syndicated from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-student-put-50-million-stolen-research-articles-online-and-theyre-free/2016/03/30/7714ffb4-eaf7-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-student-put-50-mil...
  - OJFord 10y ago
    They also all have websites. I subscribe to The Times, but only in digital, so they get my money but I'm not on that graph.
    - branchless 10y ago
      Yes, but most don't sub. Traditional media is a shadow of its former self. The content is shockingly bad. I'd love to bring back to life the editor of these papers from 30 years ago, pretty sure they would want to be dead again.
EsotericAlgo 10y ago
I recognize this is about 15 years too late but stolen is the wrong word. The vernacular usage of stolen has an inherent bias that some entity is being deprived which isn't necessarily the case.
- mkempe 10y ago
  Exactly. "Stolen" -- or liberated?
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > The vernacular usage of stolen has an inherent bias that some entity is being deprived The concepts of "stealing" an idea, i.e. taking credit for someone else's, and "stealing" someone's spotlight occur in standard vernacular [1]. These don't concern depriving someone of something they have, but depriving them of something they could have had. The logic behind modern copyright is that distribution someone else's content deprives them of potential sales, royalties, et cetera. There is reasonable debate around whether science, particularly taxpayer-funded science, should be copyrighted. But arguing you can't "steal" the intangible runs counter to our culture. A more productive line of argument lies in attacking what can be copyrighted and for how long. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=steal_INF+idea%2Csteal_INF+_DET_+spotlight&year_start=1950&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cstolen%20idea%3B%2Cc0%3B.t3%3B%2Csteal_INF%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bsteal%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bstole%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bstealing%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bstolen%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bsteals%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=steal_INF+idea...
  - jMyles 10y ago
    > counter to our culture Whose culture? The culture that surrounds me seems organized almost chiefly, and at least largely, around radical freedom of information.
    - bootload 10y ago
      @jMyles, "culture" is especially applicable to music, where musicians appropriate tunes from many cultures and enforce copyright.
finid 10y ago
Researchers sign over the copyright and provide their work, often taxpayer funded, free to publishers who then get other researchers to review the papers — also free. The publishers then sell journal subscriptions — some titles cost more than $5,000 a year — back to universities and the federal government. And if someone wants an article, that costs about $35, so that person is paying for the research and to read the results. That's a racket.
- mr337 10y ago
  Nah, it just means you are in the wrong business. /s
Dolores12 10y ago
Copying is not Stealing. Please, donate. The best library i've ever used - free, accessible and easy to use - just what library should look like in 2017.
dang 10y ago
Tons of discussion about Sci-Hub from about the time this article was published last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sci-hub%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sci-hub%20points%3E10&sort=byD...
KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
"The site can be clunky to use, often sending users to Web pages in foreign languages." That has not been my experience. In fact, I'm amazed at how when I paste a paper title into sci-hub, I get immediately redirected to the paper's PDF. I doubt such a service could be provided by Google Scholar or by the commercial publishers even if it were not for the pay walls.
- pliftkl 10y ago
  That rather depends on the papers you are looking for. If someone else has searched for the same paper before, you get the cached results back.

136 points by Jerry2 10y ago

It's a very very bad idea if you are going to do this sort of thing to attract any media attention or to ever talk to them about anything, much less let them take a picture of you.

andreyf 10y ago
Why?
- delinka 10y ago
  Because it paints a nice target upon which the gatekeepers can set law enforcement.
- aklemm 10y ago
  Have you heard the story of Aaron Swartz? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
  - aklemm 10y ago
    Weird down-votes against the Aaron Swartz example. Explain yourself.
    - GuiA 10y ago
      Same thing happened to mine, which I seem to have posted at the same time as yours. Don't sweat it, HN is full of salty people.
- GuiA 10y ago
  Check out what happened to the last guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
  - andreyf 10y ago
    Well, it makes it pretty darn obvious now that Aaron's prosecution was related to his political activities and aspirations, no? I know Aaron didn't like this cynical interpretation of the judicial system, but it seems difficult to argue against it now...
gwern 10y ago
Most of the coverage appears to've started after the indictment and other legal problems caught up with Libgen. Once they've started, waging a PR fight helps.
- ivv 10y ago
  Not sure if there's a difference, but I've always thought that her site is SciHub, not Libgen?
  - XaspR8d 10y ago
    Yes, she runs Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub eventually partnered with LibGen to help host files and reduce Sci-Hub's dependence on donated logins. (Previously all documents were accessed from their "real" journal/repository portals using credentials contributed by sympathetic academics.)
XaspR8d 10y ago
I think she has been publicly linked to Sci-Hub for a long time; by the time of the Elsevier lawsuit they knew to contact her directly.[1] Considering that she's already hiding from extradition, a little more PR probably doesn't hurt? [1] - http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york/nysdce/1:2015cv04282/442951/53/ http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york...

offa 10y ago

Upvoting because I'm interested in the discussion of the ethics surrounding 'leaking' scientific papers out into the Web, not so much in this particular case itself but as a general sort of act. HN, what is your opinion on all this?

krapp 10y ago
All scientific research should be freely available to the public, without reservation or condition. I have my reservations about leaking political or classified information in some cases, because as Wikileaks has demonstrated, leaks can be used to push a political agenda, rather than serve the cause of unbiased truth. But scientific knowledge benefits the progress of humanity as a whole - the truth doesn't have a political agenda, although it certainly can discredit political axioms. Trying to keep it contained, controlled or limit its access to a select few should be considered a crime against humanity.
- HeavenBanned 10y ago
  >All scientific research should be freely available to the public, without reservation or condition. Even scientific research on how to build a functional nuclear bomb?
  - dublinben 10y ago
    That information is harmless without the resources to do anything with it. Nonproliferation is targeted at resources, not information for this very reason.
    - aburan28 10y ago
      Exactly why the Iranian nuclear deal seeks to prevent access to the materials needed to build a bomb in a breakout period not the information
  - krapp 10y ago
    Yes, I think so. That research is already public or available on the black market anyway, and the US built the first nuclear bomb ~70 years ago, so it's kind of a moot point. But what would the alternative be? That only the governments which discover how to build a nuclear bomb understand how it works and what its effects are, and get to threaten the rest of the world with impunity? I'm not certain that would be better than the world where everyone at least understands the underlying science, even if not everyone can build one.

pigscantfly 10y ago

Gratuitous misquoting by the Independent here: "But she also acknowledges that some passwords were obtained using the kind of phishing methods that hackers use to dupe people out of financial information." based on the quote "It may be well possible that phished passwords ended up being used at Sci-Hub. I did not send any phishing emails to anyone myself." I don't understand how an editor at a major publication allows claims/spin like this with no concrete evidence unless they are explicitly pushing an agenda (I agree that phishing is at least probable in this case; it also may be an excuse to protect those in the password database if it's ever leaked). Wholly fact-based media seems impossible to find these days.

branchless 10y ago
UK newspapers are dying: http://imgur.com/NJ4F8Tt.jpg http://imgur.com/NJ4F8Tt.jpg I suspect if you cut out the number the Independent hand out for free via hotels it would be even worse. I think now they don't even have a physical edition? These guys must pay next to nothing and demand articles that get "eyeballs", produced in little time. Plus all are captive to their main advertisers: cars, banks, realtors. Why not just read blogs?
- danso 10y ago
  FWIW, this story did not originally come from the Independent. It was syndicated from the Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-student-put-50-million-stolen-research-articles-online-and-theyre-free/2016/03/30/7714ffb4-eaf7-11e5-b0fd-073d5930a7b7_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-student-put-50-mil...
- OJFord 10y ago
  They also all have websites. I subscribe to The Times, but only in digital, so they get my money but I'm not on that graph.
  - branchless 10y ago
    Yes, but most don't sub. Traditional media is a shadow of its former self. The content is shockingly bad. I'd love to bring back to life the editor of these papers from 30 years ago, pretty sure they would want to be dead again.

EsotericAlgo 10y ago

I recognize this is about 15 years too late but stolen is the wrong word. The vernacular usage of stolen has an inherent bias that some entity is being deprived which isn't necessarily the case.

mkempe 10y ago
Exactly. "Stolen" -- or liberated?
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> The vernacular usage of stolen has an inherent bias that some entity is being deprived The concepts of "stealing" an idea, i.e. taking credit for someone else's, and "stealing" someone's spotlight occur in standard vernacular [1]. These don't concern depriving someone of something they have, but depriving them of something they could have had. The logic behind modern copyright is that distribution someone else's content deprives them of potential sales, royalties, et cetera. There is reasonable debate around whether science, particularly taxpayer-funded science, should be copyrighted. But arguing you can't "steal" the intangible runs counter to our culture. A more productive line of argument lies in attacking what can be copyrighted and for how long. [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=steal_INF+idea%2Csteal_INF+_DET_+spotlight&year_start=1950&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cstolen%20idea%3B%2Cc0%3B.t3%3B%2Csteal_INF%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bsteal%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bstole%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bstealing%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bstolen%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0%3B%3Bsteals%20_DET_%20spotlight%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=steal_INF+idea...
- jMyles 10y ago
  > counter to our culture Whose culture? The culture that surrounds me seems organized almost chiefly, and at least largely, around radical freedom of information.
  - bootload 10y ago
    @jMyles, "culture" is especially applicable to music, where musicians appropriate tunes from many cultures and enforce copyright.

finid 10y ago

Researchers sign over the copyright and provide their work, often taxpayer funded, free to publishers who then get other researchers to review the papers — also free. The publishers then sell journal subscriptions — some titles cost more than $5,000 a year — back to universities and the federal government. And if someone wants an article, that costs about $35, so that person is paying for the research and to read the results. That's a racket.

mr337 10y ago
Nah, it just means you are in the wrong business. /s

Dolores12 10y ago

Copying is not Stealing. Please, donate. The best library i've ever used - free, accessible and easy to use - just what library should look like in 2017.

dang 10y ago

Tons of discussion about Sci-Hub from about the time this article was published last year: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sci-hub%20points%3E10&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sci-hub%20points%3E10&sort=byD...

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago

"The site can be clunky to use, often sending users to Web pages in foreign languages." That has not been my experience. In fact, I'm amazed at how when I paste a paper title into sci-hub, I get immediately redirected to the paper's PDF. I doubt such a service could be provided by Google Scholar or by the commercial publishers even if it were not for the pay walls.

pliftkl 10y ago
That rather depends on the papers you are looking for. If someone else has searched for the same paper before, you get the cached results back.