6 ms·

I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and r

I personally adore Sci-Hub and Libgen but that's because such is my personal alignment - I believe no such concept as "intellectual property" should exist and right (which, from my point of view, is unlimited sharing of what is usually copyrighted in this case) is more important than legal. To support my stance I can cite the German phenomenon (many attribute it's 19th century industrial growth to unconstrained knowledge distribution made possible by lack of copyright laws) and the biblical "miracle of the five loaves and two fishes" where Jesus replicated five loaves and two fishes to feed a lot of people (today copyright advocates would say replicating bread this way meant "stealing" from the baker). And the fact I then buy a legal paper copy whenever I read a pirated ebook if I liked it while the lack of a pirated copy availability would never cause me to buy a legal copy (countrary to the concept of lost profit copyright advocates use). At the same time I was initially surprised about the fact the scientific society is openly speaking pro-SciHub and pro-LibGen: most of the same people would generally say piracy is bad both because it's "stealing" from the copyright holders and because it means breaking a law. They would condemn using cracked apps, sharing movies and ignoring licenses, I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub. I find this phenomenon curious.

Tenoke 7y ago
>I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if anything when you pirate their research - those who lose money (elsevier and co) in that case are (rightly) perceived as not deserving anyway.
- rgj 7y ago
  > Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition each year.
  - hwh 7y ago
    Actually they are writing them during that time and use their staff (paid by public money), too. Whether it's copywriting, news checking for the next edition or, in fact, writing passages.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    Here in the UK we don't seem to have this problem for some reason (possibly strong student unions?). I have studied at 3 different universities, and none of them required me to spend more than £100 total in course materials for a year. For mathematics, all of my course materials were available in PDF format for free (which I could then print myself if I wished to). For Philosophy, the majority of readings were available through the library system. Some courses did require a textbook, but use of older editions was encouraged, and often a photocopied "pack" of the relevant chapters would be made available for a small fee (<£15) by the faculty office.
    - philpem 7y ago
      At least at the university I studied at, lecturers requiring their own textbooks for a course was explicitly barred as a conflict of interest. The only time it was allowed was when copies of the relevant chapters were provided free to all students in the class (in PDF or printed form). Source - I was in a class where a lecturer broke this rule. It was a £100 book with only two copies in the library for a class of 30-40. We (students) queried it and the lecturer was ordered to bring a printed copy (as in laser-printed) of the relevant chapters for each student.
    - 4gotunameagain 7y ago
      Maybe could be related to the tuition as well? In most of Europe universities are free for the students
      - Vinnl 7y ago
        There's a steep discount, but they're certainly not free in the Netherlands (nor in many other European countries).
matsemann 7y ago
> I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub. That's because textbooks is a scam the professors are in on and profit off.
Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances you mention. There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no value at all. Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not necessarily decreases sales - remember I'm not really advocating for copyright laws, just defending the coherence of the opinions of the people you are mentioning, who probably think that it does. From that standpoint, if everyone stopped paying for movies, Hollywood would close and no movies (except for hobbyist movies) would be made. If everyone stopped paying for music, music would still be made but no one would make a living from it. The same with books, etc. So in those fields, there is a causal relationship between not paying and the field itself being impacted, as well as the income of people that are doing honest work. On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. The accessibility of science would improve (everyone would be able to access papers without paying). The only ones that would suffer would be publishers that are doing largely an evil thing (restricting the access to scientific knowledge - it's hard to actually argue that they are providing access, as publis repositories already do that for free) and if they closed, it would be a net positive for science. Thus, and to sum up, it's really hard to defend paying scientific publishers, even if you generally believe in IP and copyright, because the whole market is a huge net negative for society, which is not true (or at least, not commonly believed to be true) of most other IP markets.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  > On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier for some reason.
breck 7y ago
You are not the first to logically argue that the IP concept should not exist. The problem is the people behind IP laws benefit tremendously from the lie and don’t have incentive to examine the system more closely. It would be like if tobacco makers called cigarettes “health sticks” and successfully convinced the world of the lie. If we ever hope to change things we need to go on the offensive, and that starts with speaking the truth and never using the false terms put forward by the industry. So say Intellectual Monopoly laws instead of IP. If someone is insistent on making the property analogy, agree with them and tell them there is a term that actually is more truthful than IP: intellectual slavery.
kilotaras 7y ago
Pharma industry in Switzerland also grew rapidly after start due to the fact that it didn't have patents, unlike neighboring countries.
TheOperator 7y ago
It's not really that curious. Textbook publishers pay professors significantly more than Journal publishers. Hard to get a group of people on your side when you're exploiting their work for profit and giving them jack in return.

Tenoke 7y ago

>I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from net university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub With textbooks a reasonable amount of the money goes to the authors. Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. It is not so with papers though. The professors who write them lose little if anything when you pirate their research - those who lose money (elsevier and co) in that case are (rightly) perceived as not deserving anyway.

rgj 7y ago
> Those professors write the textbooks and will lose out if you pirate them. I don’t know how it works in other countries but here in the Netherlands most professors write those textbooks during time they are already paid for by their employer, but pocket the revenue of the textbooks themselves. In the meanwhile they actively discourage the use of second-hand textbooks by requiring students to buy the latest edition each year.
- hwh 7y ago
  Actually they are writing them during that time and use their staff (paid by public money), too. Whether it's copywriting, news checking for the next edition or, in fact, writing passages.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  Here in the UK we don't seem to have this problem for some reason (possibly strong student unions?). I have studied at 3 different universities, and none of them required me to spend more than £100 total in course materials for a year. For mathematics, all of my course materials were available in PDF format for free (which I could then print myself if I wished to). For Philosophy, the majority of readings were available through the library system. Some courses did require a textbook, but use of older editions was encouraged, and often a photocopied "pack" of the relevant chapters would be made available for a small fee (<£15) by the faculty office.
  - philpem 7y ago
    At least at the university I studied at, lecturers requiring their own textbooks for a course was explicitly barred as a conflict of interest. The only time it was allowed was when copies of the relevant chapters were provided free to all students in the class (in PDF or printed form). Source - I was in a class where a lecturer broke this rule. It was a £100 book with only two copies in the library for a class of 30-40. We (students) queried it and the lecturer was ordered to bring a printed copy (as in laser-printed) of the relevant chapters for each student.
  - 4gotunameagain 7y ago
    Maybe could be related to the tuition as well? In most of Europe universities are free for the students
    - Vinnl 7y ago
      There's a steep discount, but they're certainly not free in the Netherlands (nor in many other European countries).

matsemann 7y ago

> I have met quite a number of professors who would surely expel me from the university if I had scanned an expensive textbook and shared it with other students, yet they magically support SciHub. That's because textbooks is a scam the professors are in on and profit off.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago

While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances you mention. There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no value at all. Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not necessarily decreases sales - remember I'm not really advocating for copyright laws, just defending the coherence of the opinions of the people you are mentioning, who probably think that it does. From that standpoint, if everyone stopped paying for movies, Hollywood would close and no movies (except for hobbyist movies) would be made. If everyone stopped paying for music, music would still be made but no one would make a living from it. The same with books, etc. So in those fields, there is a causal relationship between not paying and the field itself being impacted, as well as the income of people that are doing honest work. On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. The accessibility of science would improve (everyone would be able to access papers without paying). The only ones that would suffer would be publishers that are doing largely an evil thing (restricting the access to scientific knowledge - it's hard to actually argue that they are providing access, as publis repositories already do that for free) and if they closed, it would be a net positive for science. Thus, and to sum up, it's really hard to defend paying scientific publishers, even if you generally believe in IP and copyright, because the whole market is a huge net negative for society, which is not true (or at least, not commonly believed to be true) of most other IP markets.

qwerty456127 7y ago
> On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier for some reason.

breck 7y ago

You are not the first to logically argue that the IP concept should not exist. The problem is the people behind IP laws benefit tremendously from the lie and don’t have incentive to examine the system more closely. It would be like if tobacco makers called cigarettes “health sticks” and successfully convinced the world of the lie. If we ever hope to change things we need to go on the offensive, and that starts with speaking the truth and never using the false terms put forward by the industry. So say Intellectual Monopoly laws instead of IP. If someone is insistent on making the property analogy, agree with them and tell them there is a term that actually is more truthful than IP: intellectual slavery.

kilotaras 7y ago

Pharma industry in Switzerland also grew rapidly after start due to the fact that it didn't have patents, unlike neighboring countries.

TheOperator 7y ago

It's not really that curious. Textbook publishers pay professors significantly more than Journal publishers. Hard to get a group of people on your side when you're exploiting their work for profit and giving them jack in return.