4 ms·

Why are people breaking copyright law, instead of questioning the researchers who voluntarily approach the journals? Why not ask the researchers if they'd consi

by ksk 8y ago

Why are people breaking copyright law, instead of questioning the researchers who voluntarily approach the journals? Why not ask the researchers if they'd consider sharing their work? Or convince them of an alternative means of publication. There is no one-handed clap.

jMyles 8y ago
Not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where copyright law exists. Among those who do, not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where this action is a violation of that law. Of those who do, not everyone recognizes copyright law as legitimate or binding on their conduct.
- ksk 8y ago
  https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_all https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_all
  - jMyles 8y ago
    By posting this link, are you trying to indicate a belief that I am exhibiting this fallacy? Can you explain how? GP asked, "Why are people breaking copyright law?" I thought I gave a reasonably solid explanation - some of the people in question aren't breaking copyright law while others (certainly a good number of people here on HN) don't regard copyright law as a legitimate imposition of state power in the information age. What did I do wrong?
    - ksk 8y ago
      You are applying propositional logic rigor to a comment made in a casual setting that you fail to apply to your own position. Let me show you how.. >Not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where copyright law exists. How many? How did you gather this data? > Among those who do, not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where this action is a violation of that law. How did you survey the jurisdictions of people accessing this information? What legal standard did you apply to come to your conclusion of people not breaking laws? > Of those who do, not everyone recognizes copyright law as legitimate or binding on their conduct. Who has communicated to you that they don't recognize copyright law as legitimate or binding? Why is the number statistically relevant? You see? Anyone can apply rigor to any comment. It took me 5 seconds just like it would take you five seconds to apply rigor to any other comment. >I thought I gave a reasonably solid explanation I didn't see any explanation, only a logical argument. A logical argument is not means to establishing truth. Cats have four legs and a tail, but a dog is not a cat.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - jMyles 8y ago
        > Who has communicated to you that they don't recognize copyright law as legitimate or binding? Why is the number statistically relevant? To my personally? Only maybe a few dozen. But obviously these laws are ignored everywhere and by everyone in the USA. Surely you don't mean to suggest that it's a law that enjoys widespread perception of legitimacy? What makes you think people have any interest in following this law in the first place? It seems like you haven't really given this foundation, which is crucial for your original comment.
        ksk 8y ago
        You might want to read up about the Berne convention, various international copyright treaties and such. You can "ignore" laws, but you might find yourself in handcuffs on a plane, clutching an extradition order if you get popular enough. In any case that is an irrelevant aside as far as I am concerned. I don't wish for people to be jailed over this. >What makes you think people have any interest in following this law in the first place? It seems like you haven't really given this foundation, which is crucial for your original comment. Wow, really? Yes, I admit, my argument assumes that normal rational people don't go breaking laws.
        jMyles 8y ago
        > Yes, I admit, my argument assumes that normal rational people don't go breaking laws. I mean, yeah, that's a very strange assumption. Throughout the history of common law societies, normal rational people have indeed gone around breaking bad laws. Many foundational thinkers, dating back to the magna carta and further, have argued that citizens are morally bound to do this in order for this legal system to work. It's a big part of the basis of the western legal tradition. Of course Henry David Thoreau is the best known, but he's certainly not the first, nor is he an aberration Take this example: cannabis has been prohibited federally since 1937 - surely you don't think that the persistent, substantial part of the population who has consumed cannabis throughout that time is abnormal or irrational? ...and to add a slight but meaningful nuance: remember that in the tradition of the legal republic, the state is not the sovereign - the individual is. So, each of us has to determine for ourselves which edicts of the state are in fact legitimate laws. It's a perfectly valid view to hold that copyright or drug prohibition (or whatever) are not legitimate laws. You then have to ascertain the reaction of the state (a reaction which you are free to hold as illegitimate / unlawful) when it finds that its edicts are being disobeyed. It's up to each of us to build community consensus around us to disobey these edicts in keeping with our view of the legitimacy and constitutionality of the law. We are also free to use our own sensibilities about these laws when deciding to refrain from making a citizen's arrest (this refusal during the fugitive slave law period is part of what led to the creation of slave patrols, some of which have evolved into today's professional police forces) or to refrain from finding guilt as a jury. By contrast, this discretion is not cognizable for a magistrate or peace officer, whom, at least traditionally, are bound to regard all statutes of their jurisdiction as lawful. This is a cornerstone of the common law tradition.
    - sabercow 8y ago
      Because you could trivially modify the statement to be "for the people who live in a jurisdiction where copyright law applies, why do they X" and it would be clearly the spirit of the question (and even that is imprecise). The net effect of your means of conversation isn't a more cogent conversation. Instead, by causing everyone to over-specify their statements you force conversation with you to be only for the things that can be fully specified for low cost. This is only your loss. Some people will not talk to you because they know you'll just be looking to say "gotcha", not help arrive at the truth. When most people bring up ideas with others they're looking for meaningful invalidation or corroboration with the net effect of refinement of the idea. It's often popular, so you'll amass karma on HN, but I don't think you'll find it productive when improving your worldview. Forums like this have a wide variety of people with a varying degree of sophistication in a subject. You can appeal to the people with the least sophistication in the subject and be very popular. But you'll annoy the people who are skipping unnecessary steps. This is fine, but you'll end up moving the forum in the direction of less sophistication. If a maths analogy will help: imagine that you are in a group of first year maths students talking about the reordering of terms of a sequence. To the more advanced students, this means we are talking about a convergent sequence and specifically a bijection from N to N. Since it's a conversation the details are elided and these students are already making the assumptions that are, to them, obvious. Objections that their statements are untrue for some divergent sequences will simply lead to those people being left behind when the next chat happens. In practice, on the Internet, some people just aren't told where things are spoken about. I only tell you this out of love. Good luck.
      - jMyles 8y ago
        > Because you could trivially modify the statement to be "for the people who live in a jurisdiction where copyright law applies, why do they X" and it would be clearly the spirit of the question (and even that is imprecise). ...but I responded to that too, and that's the most important part of my comment. Most people in the USA clearly don't recognize copyright law as legitimate. It is flouted everywhere by everyone. GP seemed to assume that refraining from breaking copyright was important to most people; it isn't.
      - abiox 8y ago
  - davnn 8y ago
    Wow.. it’s a shame that this article is tied to the beautiful subject of logic. I’m pretty sure you can come up with such an article for any phrase you’d ever encounter.
nneonneo 8y ago
For what it's worth, while I publish in conference venues, like ACM SIGCHI and ACM UIST, I also make every paper available online on my own website as explicitly allowed by ACM's copyright rules. Many authors in my field do likewise. Unfortunately, the situation with many journals in the hard sciences tends to be more dire, especially since the longer history of their fields means that many important papers are only online as paywalled, scanned PDFs (where the original author may not even be around to make the work freely available).
s0rce 8y ago
It can take days to weeks to hear back from a busy researcher to get a copy of their paper. Half the time you skim it and determine that its not useful. Sci-hub is instant.
- ksk 8y ago
  Right, and that sort of delay can slow down the academic process. I agree with you that the current situation sucks. I'm not seeing how torrenting publications is a viable solution to this problem. This sends the signal to the publications that they're important and that their product is valuable enough to break the law. Naturally, no person wants to be out of a job, and the first course of action they're going to seek is to stop the torrenting in any way possible.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  It's faster than logging in with your university account, in fact.
rwnspace 8y ago
I think people often do approach researchers. It's just nigh-on impossible to expect researchers not to try and get published in Nature, for example. The effect on credentials (and career) is too great. And of course the department they work for will be pushing for it too. Besides being the main source of academic esteem, there is a serious structural issue where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet privately control the supply. The model seriously warps the production of research (and, arguably, the reproduction - p-hacking, fiddling with your regressions/covariants). Using Sci-hub can be considered a form of protest. Perhaps 'break copyright law' is not a universalisable rule in the spirit of Kant, but the same is true of most forms of activism.
- ksk 8y ago
  The simultaneous arguments (that get repeated often) of "journals provide little to no value and therefore publications should be free" and "researchers value the curation of top journals because (seemingly) only high quality papers get accepted" are quite at odds with each other I think. >where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet privately control the supply. But they are given the 'knowledge'. Sure, Chicken/Egg. Maybe government grants should come with a clause for open-access..
  - rwnspace 8y ago
    > The simultaneous arguments (that get repeated often) [...] are quite at odds with each other I think. Yeah, I can see your point, but I think both can reasonably appear true: credentials are very 'sticky' concepts which seem reliable and are hard to dismiss unless everyone else is doing it too... > Maybe government grants should come with a clause for open-access.. Hard agree.
  - MagnumOpus 8y ago
    > "journals provide little to no value[...]" and "researchers value the curation[...]" are quite at odds with each other I think They aren't because the journal corporations don't provide the curation, they provide the brand name that attracts heavy-hitting papers. The curation is provided by academics for free. The brand name ("impact factor" of historic papers in that journals) is the one thing that prevents migration.
Vinnl 8y ago
People are questioning the current publishing systems and trying to promote alternative means of publication. Unfortunately, it's not so simple as being able to blame a single actor: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
bborud 8y ago
Because it is inefficient and change is unlikely?
- ksk 8y ago
  Breaking copyright law doesn't change anything either. People are still going to publish in those journals. It doesn't address the central problem.
  - needToSay 8y ago
    Fuck off shill

by ksk 8y ago

jMyles 8y ago

Not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where copyright law exists. Among those who do, not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where this action is a violation of that law. Of those who do, not everyone recognizes copyright law as legitimate or binding on their conduct.

ksk 8y ago
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_all https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_all
- jMyles 8y ago
  By posting this link, are you trying to indicate a belief that I am exhibiting this fallacy? Can you explain how? GP asked, "Why are people breaking copyright law?" I thought I gave a reasonably solid explanation - some of the people in question aren't breaking copyright law while others (certainly a good number of people here on HN) don't regard copyright law as a legitimate imposition of state power in the information age. What did I do wrong?
  - ksk 8y ago
    You are applying propositional logic rigor to a comment made in a casual setting that you fail to apply to your own position. Let me show you how.. >Not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where copyright law exists. How many? How did you gather this data? > Among those who do, not everyone lives in a jurisdiction where this action is a violation of that law. How did you survey the jurisdictions of people accessing this information? What legal standard did you apply to come to your conclusion of people not breaking laws? > Of those who do, not everyone recognizes copyright law as legitimate or binding on their conduct. Who has communicated to you that they don't recognize copyright law as legitimate or binding? Why is the number statistically relevant? You see? Anyone can apply rigor to any comment. It took me 5 seconds just like it would take you five seconds to apply rigor to any other comment. >I thought I gave a reasonably solid explanation I didn't see any explanation, only a logical argument. A logical argument is not means to establishing truth. Cats have four legs and a tail, but a dog is not a cat.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jMyles 8y ago
      > Who has communicated to you that they don't recognize copyright law as legitimate or binding? Why is the number statistically relevant? To my personally? Only maybe a few dozen. But obviously these laws are ignored everywhere and by everyone in the USA. Surely you don't mean to suggest that it's a law that enjoys widespread perception of legitimacy? What makes you think people have any interest in following this law in the first place? It seems like you haven't really given this foundation, which is crucial for your original comment.
      - ksk 8y ago
        You might want to read up about the Berne convention, various international copyright treaties and such. You can "ignore" laws, but you might find yourself in handcuffs on a plane, clutching an extradition order if you get popular enough. In any case that is an irrelevant aside as far as I am concerned. I don't wish for people to be jailed over this. >What makes you think people have any interest in following this law in the first place? It seems like you haven't really given this foundation, which is crucial for your original comment. Wow, really? Yes, I admit, my argument assumes that normal rational people don't go breaking laws.
        jMyles 8y ago
        > Yes, I admit, my argument assumes that normal rational people don't go breaking laws. I mean, yeah, that's a very strange assumption. Throughout the history of common law societies, normal rational people have indeed gone around breaking bad laws. Many foundational thinkers, dating back to the magna carta and further, have argued that citizens are morally bound to do this in order for this legal system to work. It's a big part of the basis of the western legal tradition. Of course Henry David Thoreau is the best known, but he's certainly not the first, nor is he an aberration Take this example: cannabis has been prohibited federally since 1937 - surely you don't think that the persistent, substantial part of the population who has consumed cannabis throughout that time is abnormal or irrational? ...and to add a slight but meaningful nuance: remember that in the tradition of the legal republic, the state is not the sovereign - the individual is. So, each of us has to determine for ourselves which edicts of the state are in fact legitimate laws. It's a perfectly valid view to hold that copyright or drug prohibition (or whatever) are not legitimate laws. You then have to ascertain the reaction of the state (a reaction which you are free to hold as illegitimate / unlawful) when it finds that its edicts are being disobeyed. It's up to each of us to build community consensus around us to disobey these edicts in keeping with our view of the legitimacy and constitutionality of the law. We are also free to use our own sensibilities about these laws when deciding to refrain from making a citizen's arrest (this refusal during the fugitive slave law period is part of what led to the creation of slave patrols, some of which have evolved into today's professional police forces) or to refrain from finding guilt as a jury. By contrast, this discretion is not cognizable for a magistrate or peace officer, whom, at least traditionally, are bound to regard all statutes of their jurisdiction as lawful. This is a cornerstone of the common law tradition.
  - sabercow 8y ago
    Because you could trivially modify the statement to be "for the people who live in a jurisdiction where copyright law applies, why do they X" and it would be clearly the spirit of the question (and even that is imprecise). The net effect of your means of conversation isn't a more cogent conversation. Instead, by causing everyone to over-specify their statements you force conversation with you to be only for the things that can be fully specified for low cost. This is only your loss. Some people will not talk to you because they know you'll just be looking to say "gotcha", not help arrive at the truth. When most people bring up ideas with others they're looking for meaningful invalidation or corroboration with the net effect of refinement of the idea. It's often popular, so you'll amass karma on HN, but I don't think you'll find it productive when improving your worldview. Forums like this have a wide variety of people with a varying degree of sophistication in a subject. You can appeal to the people with the least sophistication in the subject and be very popular. But you'll annoy the people who are skipping unnecessary steps. This is fine, but you'll end up moving the forum in the direction of less sophistication. If a maths analogy will help: imagine that you are in a group of first year maths students talking about the reordering of terms of a sequence. To the more advanced students, this means we are talking about a convergent sequence and specifically a bijection from N to N. Since it's a conversation the details are elided and these students are already making the assumptions that are, to them, obvious. Objections that their statements are untrue for some divergent sequences will simply lead to those people being left behind when the next chat happens. In practice, on the Internet, some people just aren't told where things are spoken about. I only tell you this out of love. Good luck.
    - jMyles 8y ago
      > Because you could trivially modify the statement to be "for the people who live in a jurisdiction where copyright law applies, why do they X" and it would be clearly the spirit of the question (and even that is imprecise). ...but I responded to that too, and that's the most important part of my comment. Most people in the USA clearly don't recognize copyright law as legitimate. It is flouted everywhere by everyone. GP seemed to assume that refraining from breaking copyright was important to most people; it isn't.
    - abiox 8y ago
- davnn 8y ago
  Wow.. it’s a shame that this article is tied to the beautiful subject of logic. I’m pretty sure you can come up with such an article for any phrase you’d ever encounter.

nneonneo 8y ago

For what it's worth, while I publish in conference venues, like ACM SIGCHI and ACM UIST, I also make every paper available online on my own website as explicitly allowed by ACM's copyright rules. Many authors in my field do likewise. Unfortunately, the situation with many journals in the hard sciences tends to be more dire, especially since the longer history of their fields means that many important papers are only online as paywalled, scanned PDFs (where the original author may not even be around to make the work freely available).

s0rce 8y ago

It can take days to weeks to hear back from a busy researcher to get a copy of their paper. Half the time you skim it and determine that its not useful. Sci-hub is instant.

ksk 8y ago
Right, and that sort of delay can slow down the academic process. I agree with you that the current situation sucks. I'm not seeing how torrenting publications is a viable solution to this problem. This sends the signal to the publications that they're important and that their product is valuable enough to break the law. Naturally, no person wants to be out of a job, and the first course of action they're going to seek is to stop the torrenting in any way possible.
lucb1e 8y ago
It's faster than logging in with your university account, in fact.

rwnspace 8y ago

I think people often do approach researchers. It's just nigh-on impossible to expect researchers not to try and get published in Nature, for example. The effect on credentials (and career) is too great. And of course the department they work for will be pushing for it too. Besides being the main source of academic esteem, there is a serious structural issue where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet privately control the supply. The model seriously warps the production of research (and, arguably, the reproduction - p-hacking, fiddling with your regressions/covariants). Using Sci-hub can be considered a form of protest. Perhaps 'break copyright law' is not a universalisable rule in the spirit of Kant, but the same is true of most forms of activism.

ksk 8y ago
The simultaneous arguments (that get repeated often) of "journals provide little to no value and therefore publications should be free" and "researchers value the curation of top journals because (seemingly) only high quality papers get accepted" are quite at odds with each other I think. >where Elsevier et al receive publicly-funded knowledge, yet privately control the supply. But they are given the 'knowledge'. Sure, Chicken/Egg. Maybe government grants should come with a clause for open-access..
- rwnspace 8y ago
  > The simultaneous arguments (that get repeated often) [...] are quite at odds with each other I think. Yeah, I can see your point, but I think both can reasonably appear true: credentials are very 'sticky' concepts which seem reliable and are hard to dismiss unless everyone else is doing it too... > Maybe government grants should come with a clause for open-access.. Hard agree.
- MagnumOpus 8y ago
  > "journals provide little to no value[...]" and "researchers value the curation[...]" are quite at odds with each other I think They aren't because the journal corporations don't provide the curation, they provide the brand name that attracts heavy-hitting papers. The curation is provided by academics for free. The brand name ("impact factor" of historic papers in that journals) is the one thing that prevents migration.

Vinnl 8y ago

People are questioning the current publishing systems and trying to promote alternative means of publication. Unfortunately, it's not so simple as being able to blame a single actor: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

bborud 8y ago

Because it is inefficient and change is unlikely?

ksk 8y ago
Breaking copyright law doesn't change anything either. People are still going to publish in those journals. It doesn't address the central problem.
- needToSay 8y ago
  Fuck off shill