7 ms·

When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time becaus

by maeln 7y ago

When I was a student in engineer school in France, I had access to a lot of paper through our school subscription. I was still using Sci-Hub all the time because just copy-pasting a DOI or a paper title and getting the PDF was so much better than all the other website which had all clunky and broken login procedure, and god awful UI/UX (understanding how to download the PDF was sometimes more of a challenge than understanding the paper itself...).

qwerty456127 7y ago
That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans. I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws. Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works. It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels. Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.
- bonoboTP 7y ago
  > Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Depends on the country. In some places downloading is legal, only uploading is illegal. Also, the disk-based fee you mention does allow you to give away copies to friends and family for free in some countries.
- juliendorra 7y ago
  In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law. Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM. So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    > In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.
    - phicoh 7y ago
      The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose. Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators. Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get. As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is. In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law. For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R
ajford 7y ago
When I was a student in physics, the campus network didn't extend to the student housing or off-site students, meaning you had to be on campus or in the library to access the portals to get papers. I used sci-hub during my last year in school, but it was only just starting. It was far easier to use, plus I didn't have to compile a list of papers to fetch and wait until the next day to retrieve them.

by maeln 7y ago

qwerty456127 7y ago

That's a well-known issue: legal channels usually are ess convenient to use. That's why it often makes sense to download and use a pirated copy of a game/movie/ebook/whatever after you buy it: you both fulfill your duty and enjoy nice UX then. In case of movies, games and software sticking with a legal channel often also means you can't get it in a language you want because a particular company has an exclusive license to distribute it in your country and it would only distribute a 100% localized version (AFAIK even Netflix would only give you a choice of a small number of languages relevant to your country rather than all the languages they have actually translated a particular movie to) or offer an English version at a price higher than that of a localized version. Many old (yet still copyrighted) books also are only available as pirate scans. I wish there was a centralized database of e.g. movies where you could legally buy any movie ever filmed, with subtitles in any language and get a DRM-free copy in a common format you could play anywhere. Sadly this is hardly possible given today laws. Curiously enough some (or many?) countries have implemented a law requiring blank CD-R disks and USB thumb drives sellers to pay fixed royalty to a local copyright association (an MPAA-like entity) for every blank disk they sell because people can potentially use the disks to pirate copyrighted works. It seems to me this should logically make disk-based piracy legal as we are already paying for it and the same principle could be used to legalize pirate websites (just charge ISPs who would include a "pirate subscription fee" in the connection cost) as the most user-friendly distribution channels. Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Another fun fact about how wacky the actual intellectual property system is is you can get sued even for doing what you could never suspect might be wrong from any point of view. Even when it's about hardware, not software. A friend of mine once bought a new iPhone (from an official distributor) and mailed it to his daughter living in another country (where iPhones also are widely available officially and are sold at approximately the same price) as a birthday gift - as a result the customs sued him for Apple intellectual property infringement.

bonoboTP 7y ago
> Nevertheless piracy still is illegal although we pay for it while paying for the disks. Depends on the country. In some places downloading is legal, only uploading is illegal. Also, the disk-based fee you mention does allow you to give away copies to friends and family for free in some countries.
juliendorra 7y ago
In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). The idea is that the private copy exemption is lowering sales, and this tax balance these sales. Doesn’t make a lot of sense (who was buying several copies of the same vinyl or book?) but that’s the letter of the law. Of course it’s at the same time illegal to break DRM so you are entitled to rip DVDs /bluray to your computer for convenience but it’s illegal to do it with most disc because you would need to break the DRM. So, the tax officially doesn’t aim at compensating piracy. It’s a legal technicality because yes, the initial spirit was to levy a tax on illegal copying, but without encouraging it (“I already paid!”) or creating a global licence.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  > In France the tax on storage media (Including SSD, DVD-R, smartphones themselves, SD cards, everything) is officially a way to compensate rights holders for the legal right to make private copies (usable only with close family and relatives). Why are you meant to compensate anybody for your rights? Why not compensate potential robbers for outlawing robberies then? They could be more rich and happy if the law didn't acknowledge your right for physical safety and private property protection.
  - phicoh 7y ago
    The way it works in Europe, is that copyright is implicit: you create something, you get copyright. With copyright you get to control who can copy your work. Copyright is more seen as a natural right then as a law that has an economic purpose. Then there are a number of exceptions where blanket permission to copy is granted in return for some financial compensation for the creators. Where all of this goes wrong is that there is not a clear legal framework how creators should receive money and especially how much they should get. As somebody buying blank media, how the creators are compensated is not really an issue, but the total amount of money that gets collected is. In particular, the money is meant to compensate for legal copies under the relavant section of the copyright law. For example, essentially nobody makes legal copies of copyrighted material to DVD-R. You cannot legally copy DVDs, so the money should compensate for music files, analog video tapes, televsion, scans of paper books, etc. That happens so little that there should not be an additional tax in DVD-R

ajford 7y ago

When I was a student in physics, the campus network didn't extend to the student housing or off-site students, meaning you had to be on campus or in the library to access the portals to get papers. I used sci-hub during my last year in school, but it was only just starting. It was far easier to use, plus I didn't have to compile a list of papers to fetch and wait until the next day to retrieve them.