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Judge Recommends ISP and Search Engine Blocking of Sci-Hub in the US
- abhishek0318 9y ago"Sci-Hub itself doesn’t seem to be too bothered by the blocking prospect or the millions in damages it faces. The site has a Tor version which can’t be blocked by Internet providers, so determined scientists will still be able to access the site if they want."
- snakeanus 9y agoIn fact, I think that the tor version is the main one and that the clearnet version is just a mirror.
- olympus 9y agoOr you can purchase a VPN subscription that lets you connect through different countries. I have one that lets me connect through dozens of countries and it's faster than the Tor network. It isn't iron clad security, but it gets around any geo-based IP blocking, and would work in this case as well.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- woodandsteel 9y agoSo if the ISP's act on this recommendation, it will lead to many more people downloading and using Tor.
- danharaj 9y agoVPN usage amongst academics suddenly skyrockets.
- CoolGuySteve 9y agoIt's ironic that our academics might have to employ the same tactics as Chinese academics due to government censorship.
- cookiecaper 9y agoThat's copyright for you. Its purpose has been totally inverted, and now, rather than functioning primarily as the artificial constraint on supply that allows people to market their intellectual goods, it's mostly used by big companies to quash competitive threats and silence dissenters (pretty much what you'd expect from an aggressive speech control like copyright). Copyright is so ingrained into our assumptions and culture that we almost never think or talk about it, but it's the beating heart behind so much of what drives the biggest companies today. Consider that massive logistical operations that deliver critical supplies to people across the country every day, like Exxon and Walmart, are rivaled by companies that just print out DVDs. At some point we need to look at this and ask ourselves why these people are allowed to use a strictly artificial, government-granted monopoly to capture returns so disjointed from the social utility they provide, and think about the bigger picture effects of awarding them that excess. Copyright and the CFAA are a disastrous tag team for online entrepreneurship, and the mechanism by which Google, Facebook, et al enforce their effective monopolies. The CFAA makes it illegal to get content over a network without having permission first, and copyright makes it illegal to load those pages into RAM whether you're authorized to download them or not. Of course, when Google et al were brought to task for their ignorance of these laws, after dozens if not hundreds of small sites doing very similar things had been mercilessly crushed by the legal system, the judges magically felt that Google's use was "fair" (see Perfect 10 v. Amazon). IANAL but people grossly underestimate the draconian reach of copyright legislation. And that's not really an accident; media outlets don't want attention on this, because they know if people realized how bad these laws are, their gravy train wouldn't last much longer.
- Karrot_Kream 9y agoI wasn't aware of the combo of CFAA and copyright. Are there any blog posts describing amendments and court cases regarding CFAA/copyright that a layman can read into?
- snakeanus 9y agoThey can just use tor.
- modzu 9y agooutrageous
- harigov 9y agoThis is why making journals publicly accessible isn't a technical problem as much as a legal or policy one. Otherwise, this will just turn into a cat and mouse game with enough legal ramifications for those who use it.
- modzu 9y agodont universities pay for subscriptions, so most academics can already access these materials via their own library? where does the number 4 million come from? i figured sites like this are broadening access to scientific literature to people outside the institution -- who otherwise would not be subscribing anyway (maybe im wrong?)
- moftz 9y agoNo university will subscribe to everything so there are plenty of academics that may require journal articles that they either aren't subscribed to or can't get on loan form another university. Unless the school has given you a budget to pay the $35+ per article, then using a site like sci-hub is the only choice.
- codedokode 9y agoBut scientist and professor job is well paid in America, 35 dollars should not be a problem, compared to the costs a student pays to the university each year (hundred thousand dollars), right?
- AlotOfReading 9y agoAcademics can afford individual papers, but they read dozens to hundreds of papers a month. Add in the fact that many of the papers needed are simply to even check if they're relevant and it's incredibly hard to justify. Also, American unis don't charge $100k/yr. Half that is enough for an ivy.
- madhadron 9y agoA few, extremely prestigious professors at a big university will make more than $100k/year. The vast majority make less, often in the range of half that.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoFor those with any moral ambiguity around sci-hub, as an american citizen simply trying to research questions like "What chemicals that act like estrogens are in my public water, and in what dose?" you unfortunately cannot effectively without either purchasing articles at $45 each or using sci-hub.
- geofft 9y agoWell, of course, this is America. You want information without paying for it? What are you, some kind of communist? Some of our laws require payment to read! https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-activist-violated-copyright-by-publishing-georgia-legal-code-online/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a... (And that's not even counting the amount of law in the US that is from case law instead of statutes; most case law is behind some sort of paywall. Hence RECAP, which is sort of like Sci-Hub for law.)
- louithethrid 9y agoYeah, wanting something for your tax talers - who could even contemplate something like this- that would be like a normal buisness relationship with a government. Sounds evil and twisted to me.
- tzs 9y agoThere are a couple other options available to a majority in the US: • Many libraries have free online access to very large journal collections and are open to the public. • Deepdyve.com. It's kind of like Spotify for journals. Unlimited online access to a very large collection for a fixed monthly or annual fee.
- ch4s3 9y agoDeepdyve is a little pricy at $40/mo and only allows you to print 20 pages/mo.
- akg_67 9y ago> Many libraries have free online access to very large journal collections and are open to the public. Most US public libraries don’t have access to ‘scientific’ journals. Only educational and research institutions libraries subscribe and provide access to their faculty students and staff. Most univ libraries are not ‘officially’ open to general public.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lifeisstillgood 9y agoIs "public interest" a defence here? As an outlier, let's imagine someone discovers the cure for cancer, and publishes it via Nature. Who then demand a billion for each article viewing. I can easily see a public interest defence succeeding in this made up case, so where is the line?
- moftz 9y agoIn the real world, the guy discovering the cure for cancer received grants from universities, research institutes, and corporations. Whoever bankrolled the research, those groups own the cure and then can do what they please with it (manufacture it, sell it, give it away...) Nature wouldn't become the sole distributer of that knowledge.
- snakeanus 9y ago> (manufacture it, sell it, give it away...) hide it, inflate the value of applying the cure, etc
- eesmith 9y agoThe restriction is on copyright. If a cancer cure is published in Nature then I can take the facts from it and publish it. Copyright does not apply to facts. Others can then use my publication for their own treatments, without access the original paper. To get to your question of "public interest", one argument for Sci-Hub is precisely that: > In her defense Alexandra Elbakyan has cited Article 27 (1.) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights "to share in scientific advancement and its benefits", It's very unlikely that it would work in the US. I think issues related copyright ownership of scientific publications was resolved 40 or so years ago. I vaguely recall it was coupled with changed to the Copyright Act of 1976. At the very least, that's about the time you start seeing explicit copyright statements appearing in scientific publications.
- xvilka 9y agoToo much money on stake. Publishers will surely bribe or apply pressure somehow to the judges, or anyone on their way.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ColanR 9y agoIs there any way to download the docs en masse to serve as a mirror? I imagine the total is in the tens of terabytes (at the very least), but maybe a physics-related mirror would be possible for one person.
- koolba 9y agoHow about a TOR hidden service? You wouldn't need to cache anything though bandwidth may be an issue.
- simcop2387 9y agoI'd think IPFS and similar services would be perfect for this kind of thing.
- inetsee 9y agoSci-Hub has an onion address ("scihub22266oqcxt.onion") for access through Tor.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoThere's torrent repository on libgen which (I believe) contains both the books on libgen and the research on sci-hub. They don't have descriptive file names however, so I'm not sure about turning the backup into a mirror.
- zapt02 9y agoThey also provide regular database dumps so it should be easy to match up the files to their content.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y agoAh, didn't know that! Thanks.
- FTA 9y agoEver since I heard about Sci-Hub, I knew judgements along this line would be incoming eventually. The only way to solve the science publishing problem is from the top down: lean on scientific funding agencies for them to mandate results must be published in an open access journal. Take it a step further and say none of this "pay-us-super-extra-money-on-top-to-open-your-article-up-early" garbage either. Hesitation from many scientists to publish in open access is that many full open access journals are not as popular and thus you lose some impact or credibility to the works when publishing in them. But if everyone is forced to migrate to open access, that will go away--perhaps with a few years of turbulence. Otherwise, the behemoths like RELX and Wiley will endlessly pursue any sort of effort to open up their copyrighted material (and rightly so within their legal rights), just like the RIAA and music sharing.
- tehwebguy 9y ago> Otherwise, the behemoths like RELX and Wiley will endlessly pursue any sort of effort to open up their copyrighted material (and rightly so within their legal rights), just like the RIAA and music sharing. Who cares? They will burn their money in court in exchange for literally nothing. That is exactly the result the world should hope for.
- clarkmoody 9y ago> The only way to solve ... top down ... mandate ... everyone is forced Or you could think carefully through the incentive structure of the scientific publishing system to see if there are places where small tweaks could go a long way. This is a system that emerged over centuries, and using your top-down hammer may change it in the short-run, but it will invariably morph into something unintended and unexpected if the proper incentives are not in place to guarantee long-term success. And I don't think those incentives should be another dose of your hammer. The landscape includes many parties: researchers who produce papers, journals that publish papers, consumers who read papers, institutions that pay for journals, institutions that fund research, and institutions that employ researchers. There are probably more. All of them have different costs, preferences, and incentives. Disentangling that web may yield some very good opportunities for improvement, either as policy, advocacy, or entrepreneurship. Don't get me wrong for a second: I'm not defending the copyright lobby and its obscene partnership with the state.
- Nyrkki 9y agoThe judge who "recommended" this is the same one which in July 2013 issued a warrant for the arrest of Edward Snowden.. > Source : https://ballotpedia.org/John_F._Anderson https://ballotpedia.org/John_F._Anderson
- matt4077 9y agoLets not ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by "I wish the law didn't allow for this. But it does". I mean: I'm as sympathetic to Snowden as anybody. But it's pretty obvious that the law, as it currently is, allows for his prosecution. Judges are among the last remaining people sometimes allowing for larger ideals to trump the immediate business, and this "rule of law" they seem to cling to may come in handy some day.
- theyregreat 9y agoSounds like he’s running for a Trump appointment.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- jancsika 9y agoSo here's a simple question: Why hasn't the maintainer of sci-hub backed up the existing content up in a series of publicly-available torrents-- either by category, or if that's too difficult even arbitrarily with the torrents enumerated? Especially now, when it's obvious it's only a matter of time before the service gets blocked. E.g.: "Sci-hub is temporarily down until you fools replicated all these things."
- jrowley 9y agoI imagine there has to be some group of people trying to upload it's contents using IPFS. Seems like a natural solution to the problem, since navigating files would be easier vs torrent.
- ashark 9y agoIPFS has its own challenges with large, living collections like this, which results in their not being especially navigation- and updating-friendly without an external content index and some custom tooling on top of IPFS. In practice it ends up being about as cumbersome as torrents. At least AFAIK. I'd love to know if that's not true, since it's one of the things keeping me from adopting IPFS for certain use cases.
- jrowley 9y agoAhh the immutable nature could be a limitation. Good point.
- ashark 9y agoSpecific issues include: 1) you can only provide useful names (not simply hashes) for things that are in directories, so a large number of bare files (easiest to update in IPFS) absolutely requires an external index linking the hash to a friendly name. I haven't found a suitable tool for automating any of this. 2) you can't modify an existing IPFS directory in-place and just get a new hash—you need the whole thing outside of IPFS to perform a CRUD operation. Maybe you can perform some trick with links or something, IDK, but it's definitely a pain. This makes One Giant Root Directory to Rule Them All very cumbersome. 3) IPNS is kind-of a solution, but centralizes things, and you can only host one of them per node-daemon (!) and last I checked these were still prone to availability problems and general quirky behavior. 4) Most software that doesn't speak IPFS natively (so, nearly everything) expects stuff to be in ordinary directories. Nothing expects to receive as config giant list of files that's changing all the time. They all expect one directory, or maybe a few directories, often with some reasonable structure. Translating between easiest-for-IPFS (a whole bunch of bare files, or smallish sets of closely related files each in their own root directory) and easiest-for-literally-all-other-software-that-uses-the-filesystem practically requires some kind of linking—I am not aware of any existing solution for this. [EDIT] to be clear, (4) is no less a problem if you're using an IPFS FUSE mount. In fact you'd have to for linking to be viable at all, though I'm not 100% sure it works even then.
- ackfoo 9y agoThis is wonderful! I had never herd of sci-hub, but now I have bookmarked them. Anyone know where I can contribute money to their legal defence fund?
- matt4077 9y agoClick on that bookmark of yours and their "donate" button?
- gpm 9y agoNote that sci-hub's "legal defense" is "don't subject themselves to American jurisdiction"... The part about winning a default judgment at the top literally means sci hub didn't show up to court. Not to say you shouldn't contribute to them, or that your money won't be useful in working around this. But it's probably not going to be used for a traditional legal defense.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoYea, this happens every few years with these sites. They get taken down and then someone redoes them. Sites like this are probably going to be redone every few years until things change.
- rdiddly 9y agoSo SciHub just became part of the dark net. "The Darknet - nobody goes there except people interested in crime, porn, and... science."
- sitkack 9y agoScience is a subset of crime.
- LeoPanthera 9y agoI thought sci-hub was only available as an onion. I'm genuinely surprised they're available on the open web.
- Sharlin 9y agoI'm pretty sure 99.99% of sci-hub users don't know how to use Tor and wouldn't bother learning.
- prklmn 9y agoMaybe the net impact of this is an explosion in Tor usage...
- LeoPanthera 9y agoTor Browser makes it practically one-click these days, doesn't it? You can even get Tor browsers for iOS/Android.
- ameliaquining 9y agoThat still requires you to download an app, which is significantly higher friction than clicking a link in a browser.
- davidgerard 9y agoOr indeed http://onion.link/ http://onion.link/
- mindslight 9y agoI'm more concerned by Netflix et al brainwashing people into supporting the content cartels than a purchased judge verbally masturbating. The more reasons for every person to move to secure protocols, the better.
- ballenf 9y agoIf this moves forward it would be unprecedented in the US: > If the U.S. District Court Judge adopts this recommendation, it would mean that Internet providers such as Comcast could be ordered to block users from accessing Sci-Hub. That’s a big deal since pirate site blockades are not common in the United States. This isn't just routine domain name forfeiture, this could escalate to an order requiring ISPs to block IP addresses, which is far more troubling. Am I missing something?
- megous 9y agoIt will never work. At least without some vpn blocking distopia.
- ballenf 9y agoI'm not worried about it working. I'm worried about the precedent, but I take solace in the remoteness of success. Trying to force an action to be taken by every ISP in the country without naming them in a suit, is very unlikely to be upheld. Comcast et al could voluntarily comply and users would probably have no basis to challenge them, but that seems unlikely given the floodgates it would open from other copyright owners.
- csomar 9y agoIt will not work but it'll evolve into something similar to the great firewall of china.
- inimino 9y agoIn other words, it will work.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoEven if this goes through, I'm hopeful that the cat-and-mouse game with torrents, third-party mirrors, Tor and IPFS will take enough time for the scientific publishing industry to die anyway.
- drvdevd 9y agoSeriously. Can anyone here explain what value they’re currently adding?
- devrandomguy 9y agoIt sure is frustrating that a site whose only purpose is to serve documents, and is created by people who advocate Tor, requires JavaScript for all navigation. Even the "about" anchor in the footer has an onClick instead of an href. What were they thinking? Heck, a vanilla Wordpress install would have been sufficient for this, if they don't have resources for anything other than a free off-the-shelf solution.
- forapurpose 9y agoThe fundamental problem is that we use the wrong tool to solve the problem of academic publication: We use the free market, which limits distribution to those who can pay the most in order to maximize profit - that's how the tool is intended to work. That's great for some things, such as laptops, but it works against the mission of scientific research, for which the mission is to advance knowledge, advance the world, and solve important problems. Unfortunately, our society now dogmatically applies the free market hammer to almost every problem, nail, screw, wheel, or fragile crystal vase. If only Einstein had thought of it - how much could he have sold the theories of special and general relativity for? How much could Watson and Crick cashed in for? Tim Berrners-Lee?
- rvern 9y agoA free market is a “market in which trade is unregulated by government; an economic system free from government intervention.”[1] Copyright is a monopoly enforced by the government on the use and distribution of an original work.[2] The tool we use for academic publications is copyright, not the free market. The free market outcome is Sci-Hub. The monopoly-enforced-by-the-government outcome is Elsevier, the RIAA, the MPAA, rent-seeking by the aforementioned organizations, proprietary software, and DRM. The fundamental problem is indeed that we use the wrong tool to solve the problem of academic publication. We should use the free market, instead of government-enforced regulation. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_market https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_market [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right
- Iv 9y agoFuck US copyright laws. This is a case where disobedience is a moral necessity while society weeds out the parasites that maintain that situation.
- tmnvix 9y agoI can't help but feel that the ongoing push for ISP blacklisting of sites is only going to make VPN usage commonplace - to the point where it is more common than not. When do they come for the VPNs?
- woodandsteel 9y agoThe basic problem for the publishers is technological advance. Publishing became a big industry due to the invention of the printing press. And because publishing a book requires a printing shop that can be easily located by the police, it was practical to pass copyright laws that forbid counterfeiting. With the invention of the internet, piracy become trivially easy and basically impossible to block, and so copyright laws are simply not enforceable. I think the publishing houses realize this, and are just trying to hold off their demise as long as possible.
- manquer 9y agoIt is not that simple. Content curation and editing is just as big part of publishing as distribution is. Technology has only solved the distribution problem. It still takes lot of expensive human work to select the good quality works and proofread /edit/ peer review them etc before it is fit for publishing in a decent journal. Ppl are more than willing to pay for legal content if it's in consumable form in a reasonable price point as Netflix and spotify have shown successfully.
- ferdterguson 9y ago> It still takes lot of expensive human work to select the good quality works and proofread /edit/ peer review them etc before it is fit for publishing in a decent journal Good thing that almost all of that expensive effort is done by volunteer scientist editors and reviewers. I routinely see spelling errors and english errors (going against journal guidelines for British/US english) in scientific literature. I'm convinced publishers do as little proofing as possible.
- madhadron 9y agoFor the major journals (Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS), they don't do any. There is no copy editing. That's the author's responsibility now.
- drvdevd 9y agoWe’re entering an era where the public will start to become more interested in technical Scientific publications generally, IMO. At some point the “prestige” afforded by research gatekeepers will reach a point of diminishing returns for professionals looking to publish.
- AlexCoventry 9y agoFrom the brief: "the public interest favors an injunction, as there is a "public interest reflected in the Constitutional protection of copyright, and the congressional enactment of the Copyright Act, is enhanced by issuance of a permanent injunction where copyright infringement has taken place."" Which public interest? https://torrentfreak.com/images/scireportrect.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/scireportrect.pdf
- mnm1 9y agoCan someone explain how such an order is legal and doesn't violate search engines' first amendment rights? As a search engine how can I be compelled to comply with this when this case has no relation to me? Furthermore if I an forced to comply how is that not a violation of my rights to free speech? And why should I be forced to spend my resources essentially censoring for the U.S. government? Is it now illegal to link to sites that may or may not have copyrighted content? Am I going to have to follow every single U.S. case going forward and keep on censoring for the government forever? Last I checked, this wasn't child porn, just simple web links.
- bubblethink 9y agoThis is as legal as any other DMCA takedown. Replace movie with a pdf. That's all that has changed. All other arguments remain the same.
- fractal618 9y agoNuts