4 ms·

Sci-hub is doing what google once promised: making the world's information accessible to everyone.

judge2020 5y ago
Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)
- perihelions 5y ago
  In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" -- they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint?) They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.
  - musicale 5y ago
    > Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint News snippets seem analogous to thumbnails in image search. I imagine a fair use defense might be affected by 1) how much of the content is used (e.g. small abstracts vs. full articles) 2) whether the use is transformative (e.g. for an internet search index vs. in a virtual newspaper), and 3) whether the use is commercial (e.g. whether it's by Google or archive.org, and whether there are advertisements shown next to the snippets.)
    - perihelions 5y ago
      Well, sure! This boundary between what is and isn't legitimate in copyright law is a nebulous, culturally relative thing. That's the point I tried to make, by analogizing Google's legal problems with SciHub's. I agree that Google News snippet things are exactly what US "fair use" exemptions were written for, and are clearly a net public benefit. Some people don't; French law for instance definitively falls on the "deliberate infringement on a massive scale" side, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 ("France fines Google €500M over copyright row") Thesis: mainstream thinking overstates the moral difference between these two -- and understates the morality-distorting effect of money, lawyers, and lobbying.
- _Nat_ 5y ago
  > Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) Academics generally value their work being made accessible. Paywalls that obstruct human progress are contemptible, and I suspect that most academics at least dislike them.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) That's one of the few good things you can say about Google today. To me, the whole point of contention here is just an artifact of a serious problem with the web as a whole, a problem to which Google contributed thanks to their role in Internet advertising. The problem is: "content creators" have too much control over the form of what they put out there. That Google is taking some of that control, by republishing the data in a different form, is just a different flavor of the issue; whether it's the "content creators" or Google that control the form, it's not the end users. Right now, the fight is mostly between people peddling ad-infused, SEO-ridden garbage sites and Google rehosting the little real content their have in a half-assed, often wrong or improperly attributed, box on the results page. Both sides have strong, user-hostile reasons to be in this fight. Neither has "making knowledge accessible" in mind. To truly make knowledge accessible, it needs to be published in a machine-readable format and accessible as if through a database. Just like when building a database-backed system, you don't put React components into your database rows, and you don't render your frontend from stored procedures, accessing the "information superhighway" shouldn't involve navigating countless of web pages that wrap the information you need in tons of garbage (nor it should involve hoping that the magic Google box will pick up the correct bit to show you). You should be able to make queries, get the data without all the formatting fluff, and browse it through whatever client software you want - and then issue further queries. I mean, note how many successful startups out there exist only because publicly available information is not machine-readable, and all they do is scrapping, mixing, and republishing the data. E.g., in my country, there's a popular tool that tells you how to get from point A to point B using public transportation - but it only exists because the official time tables are published as web pages. It would not need to exist if you could just do an equivalent of arbitrary SQL query on the official data. But you can't, so you have to use that other tool whose vendor did the necessary scrapping work - and you can't get at the data itself in that tool either, because they have to lock it down to justify their existence. Sorry for the rant. I could go on and on. I might write a long blog post about it eventually. But in this context the point is that both "content creators" and Google know they're not acting in the best interest of the people. They're just fighting over the money printing machine.
  - 5y ago
zffr 5y ago
I would argue that google did a pretty good job of that for information on websites. Sci-hub is specifically focused on academic papers.
musicale 5y ago
To "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" sounds like a great mission to me. Unfortunately the "universally accessible" part seems to be incompatible with current copyright law, so amazing resources like the Google Library Project are reduced to a glorified card catalog/search index rather than an actual online library. Unlike Google, Sci-hub has so far managed to evade copyright law, so it can fulfill more of the "universal access" part.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Google's been stymied by copyright. The Internet Archive and Open Library ... to a much greater degree ... have not. And much of the material there is the result of Google scans. I still prefer unencumbered sources (LibGen, ZLibrary, Sci-Hub), but at least having the option of access through the Archive is helpful. Reading books on my own device with local optimsed software remains superior to Archive.org's Bookreader, though the latter is pretty darned good.
  - repsilat 5y ago
    I agree, but would add -- five years ago "Google has been stymied by copyright" was most of the story for them, but today "Google is subject to political pressure to exercise editorial control" (to put it charitably) is as important. Not to diminish the disappointment over Google Books being curtailed (Google actually went to court for it!), or DMCA takedowns on Youtube or Google Search results. But we also have to admit that today Youtube is exercising editorial control to ban opinions they don't like, and that Google Cloud is as quick to drop "the wrong kinds of customers" as the payment processors everyone was complaining about ten years ago. Maybe "getting ahead of the censors" minimises the damage, maybe it encourages the censors. I don't know. I guess the company is run by smart people who want to make as much money as possible in the long term, so it's likely good for consumers on net. That said, it's a shame we don't see them fighting for those principles today.
  - musicale 5y ago
    > Internet Archive and Open Library ... to a much greater degree ... have not. And much of the material there is the result of Google scans Are Google scans really in the Open Library? If so, that's very interesting. The Open Library does seem to be operating under the shadow of copyright law, since it deployed DRM that attempts to eliminate some of the innate properties (unlimited readers, instant free copying and distribution, etc.) of ebooks, presumably to avoid copyright claims - and then got in trouble for reducing those restrictions briefly during a global pandemic.

judge2020 5y ago

Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)

perihelions 5y ago
In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" -- they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint?) They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.
- musicale 5y ago
  > Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint News snippets seem analogous to thumbnails in image search. I imagine a fair use defense might be affected by 1) how much of the content is used (e.g. small abstracts vs. full articles) 2) whether the use is transformative (e.g. for an internet search index vs. in a virtual newspaper), and 3) whether the use is commercial (e.g. whether it's by Google or archive.org, and whether there are advertisements shown next to the snippets.)
  - perihelions 5y ago
    Well, sure! This boundary between what is and isn't legitimate in copyright law is a nebulous, culturally relative thing. That's the point I tried to make, by analogizing Google's legal problems with SciHub's. I agree that Google News snippet things are exactly what US "fair use" exemptions were written for, and are clearly a net public benefit. Some people don't; French law for instance definitively falls on the "deliberate infringement on a massive scale" side, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 ("France fines Google €500M over copyright row") Thesis: mainstream thinking overstates the moral difference between these two -- and understates the morality-distorting effect of money, lawyers, and lobbying.
_Nat_ 5y ago
> Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) Academics generally value their work being made accessible. Paywalls that obstruct human progress are contemptible, and I suspect that most academics at least dislike them.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) That's one of the few good things you can say about Google today. To me, the whole point of contention here is just an artifact of a serious problem with the web as a whole, a problem to which Google contributed thanks to their role in Internet advertising. The problem is: "content creators" have too much control over the form of what they put out there. That Google is taking some of that control, by republishing the data in a different form, is just a different flavor of the issue; whether it's the "content creators" or Google that control the form, it's not the end users. Right now, the fight is mostly between people peddling ad-infused, SEO-ridden garbage sites and Google rehosting the little real content their have in a half-assed, often wrong or improperly attributed, box on the results page. Both sides have strong, user-hostile reasons to be in this fight. Neither has "making knowledge accessible" in mind. To truly make knowledge accessible, it needs to be published in a machine-readable format and accessible as if through a database. Just like when building a database-backed system, you don't put React components into your database rows, and you don't render your frontend from stored procedures, accessing the "information superhighway" shouldn't involve navigating countless of web pages that wrap the information you need in tons of garbage (nor it should involve hoping that the magic Google box will pick up the correct bit to show you). You should be able to make queries, get the data without all the formatting fluff, and browse it through whatever client software you want - and then issue further queries. I mean, note how many successful startups out there exist only because publicly available information is not machine-readable, and all they do is scrapping, mixing, and republishing the data. E.g., in my country, there's a popular tool that tells you how to get from point A to point B using public transportation - but it only exists because the official time tables are published as web pages. It would not need to exist if you could just do an equivalent of arbitrary SQL query on the official data. But you can't, so you have to use that other tool whose vendor did the necessary scrapping work - and you can't get at the data itself in that tool either, because they have to lock it down to justify their existence. Sorry for the rant. I could go on and on. I might write a long blog post about it eventually. But in this context the point is that both "content creators" and Google know they're not acting in the best interest of the people. They're just fighting over the money printing machine.
- 5y ago

zffr 5y ago

I would argue that google did a pretty good job of that for information on websites. Sci-hub is specifically focused on academic papers.

musicale 5y ago

To "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" sounds like a great mission to me. Unfortunately the "universally accessible" part seems to be incompatible with current copyright law, so amazing resources like the Google Library Project are reduced to a glorified card catalog/search index rather than an actual online library. Unlike Google, Sci-hub has so far managed to evade copyright law, so it can fulfill more of the "universal access" part.

dredmorbius 5y ago
Google's been stymied by copyright. The Internet Archive and Open Library ... to a much greater degree ... have not. And much of the material there is the result of Google scans. I still prefer unencumbered sources (LibGen, ZLibrary, Sci-Hub), but at least having the option of access through the Archive is helpful. Reading books on my own device with local optimsed software remains superior to Archive.org's Bookreader, though the latter is pretty darned good.
- repsilat 5y ago
  I agree, but would add -- five years ago "Google has been stymied by copyright" was most of the story for them, but today "Google is subject to political pressure to exercise editorial control" (to put it charitably) is as important. Not to diminish the disappointment over Google Books being curtailed (Google actually went to court for it!), or DMCA takedowns on Youtube or Google Search results. But we also have to admit that today Youtube is exercising editorial control to ban opinions they don't like, and that Google Cloud is as quick to drop "the wrong kinds of customers" as the payment processors everyone was complaining about ten years ago. Maybe "getting ahead of the censors" minimises the damage, maybe it encourages the censors. I don't know. I guess the company is run by smart people who want to make as much money as possible in the long term, so it's likely good for consumers on net. That said, it's a shame we don't see them fighting for those principles today.
- musicale 5y ago
  > Internet Archive and Open Library ... to a much greater degree ... have not. And much of the material there is the result of Google scans Are Google scans really in the Open Library? If so, that's very interesting. The Open Library does seem to be operating under the shadow of copyright law, since it deployed DRM that attempts to eliminate some of the innate properties (unlimited readers, instant free copying and distribution, etc.) of ebooks, presumably to avoid copyright claims - and then got in trouble for reducing those restrictions briefly during a global pandemic.