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Indian academics throw weight behind Sci-Hub and LibGen in landmark case
- abalaji 5y agoAs much as the common good benefits from tools like SciHub, I was not expecting there to be any legal footing for this case until the end of the article which mentioned: > Bapat, of Internet Freedom, says India’s copyright law is more progressive than many developed countries. “By that I mean that there's a research exception provided under the copyright act. It means that if you are using copyright material for research then it would not constitute infringement.” And sure enough: > 52. Certain acts not to be infringement of copyright. — [...] (i) private or personal use, including research [1] I guess this is tangential to "fair use" exceptions under US copyright lawas. [1] https://copyright.gov.in/Exceptions.aspx https://copyright.gov.in/Exceptions.aspx
- vkk8 5y ago> private or personal use, including research [1] Doesn't that mean that most forms of piracy should be legal in India? That is, torrenting movies or music, etc.?
- unmole 5y agoNo, the exceptions are for fair dealing which is limited in scope.
- webmobdev 5y agoThat sounds like stretching the law a bit too much. :) But, regarding piracy of copyright material, indian courts have said that downloading or streaming a movie from the internet is not a criminal act. It is only the distribution of copyright material that is illegal and a criminal act. Ofcourse, in this case (SciHub), I am guessing the argument would be that copyrighting research material (science / knowledge) is itself absurd and detrimental to society, and that should trump the interests of the copyright holder.
- alok-g 5y ago+1. What if someone claims they are watching movie for purposes of research!
- tediousdemise 5y agoThere is a similar phenomenon in India where international drug patents are largely ignored. Their pharmaceutical market is flooded with cheap generics. It's gotten to the point where the rest of the world just orders their meds online from India. I'm stating the obvious here: the only people who like copyright laws are the 1% who profit from them. The rest of the 99% get to suffer.
- shash 5y agoHere’s the relevant section from the Copyright Act in India: 2[39. Acts not infringing broadcast reproduction right or performer’s right.— No broadcast reproduction right or performer's right shall be deemed to be infringed by— (a) the making of any sound recording or visual recording for the private use of the person making such recording, or solely for purposes of bona fide teaching or research;
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoWhat would be the unintended consequences to porting this to the U.S.? As in, legislation that makes bona fide research an explicit fair use case?
- nicoburns 5y agoI think this might well be a case of: not a lot. This might be a pretty straightforward win:
- rndgermandude 5y ago>What would be the unintended consequences to porting this to the U.S.? Some Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and ACS lobbyists and counsels would lose their income.
- captn3m0 5y agoThere’s also an interesting precedent here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rameshwari_Photocopy_Service https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rame...
- bubblethink 5y agoThat's not really a precedent. A shop making photocopies (generally at the request of its customers) is not at all similar to a website.
- unmole 5y agoIt is precedent because the judgement states: > Concerning the argument that there cannot be an intermediary when use of copyrighted material post reproduction takes place in the course of instruction... The argument concerning use of an agency is thus irrelevant. https://web.archive.org/web/20190530065215/http://lobis.nic.in/ddir/dhc/PNJ/judgement/09-12-2016/PNJ09122016RFAOS812016.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20190530065215/http://lobis.nic....
- bubblethink 5y agoThanks for the link. It was an interesting read. Nonetheless, it leans quite heavily on use in the 'course of instruction' which is not the case for sci-hub. The crux of that case seems to be that the University of Delhi had authorised the shop to make the copies, and hence the agency of the shop is rightly moot. AFAIK, no university has endorsed sci-hub (for e.g., by way of posting links to sci-hub on a university or a course page). Should that happen, I guess the ties to this case would be closer.
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoIndia also has patent law that says you cannot patent life, so Monsanto’s patents aren’t valid in India.
- devnull3 5y agoAlso Software patents. However, lawyers find an easy way around to somehow word it as innovation rooted in hardware.
- mandis 5y agoAnywhere I can read more about this?
- waterhouse 5y agoSearching a bit, you might check out Karmarkar's algorithm for solving linear programming problems in polynomial time. Note that it is literally called an "algorithm", and that linear programming problems were taught in my 11th grade math class. Yet it did eventually get patented, after controversy and publicity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmarkar%27s_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmarkar%27s_algorithm The patent, linked from above: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4744028 https://patents.google.com/patent/US4744028
- svat 5y agoWhat makes you suggest Karmarkar's algorithm as relevant to Indian patent law? As the Wikipedia article you linked points out, Narendra Karmarkar left India in 1978, getting an M.S. from Caltech in 1979, PhD from Berkeley in 1983, and briefly joining IBM in California as a post-doc (1983) and then AT&T Bell Labs (later in 1983): he came up with Karmarkar's algorithm while at IBM and applied for the patent while at Bell Labs, so everything related to it happened in the US. (The fact that Karmarkar was from India, or that he returned to India in the late 1990s, has no bearing here.) (Unless your comment was about software patents in general, and not India's patent law specifically.)
- rmbyrro 5y agoNot just India, many developing countries didn't follow what European countries tried to enforce through Berne Convention. Thankfully they saw it wasn't on the best interest of economic and social development. Brazil and other Latin American countries have many provisions protecting freedom for private use, teaching and research purposes.
- netcan 5y agoImo, the net benefit of copyright and patent law is dubious broadly. For a developing country signing up to an IP system under which most of the important IP assets are foreign... I find it hard to see an argument.
- xyzzyz 5y agoThat’s because you have little experience with how developing countries actually operate. One common ways developing countries use to build their industrial know how and capacity is to get a foreign company to create a development in it. A factory, manufacturing center, or R&D site. Companies are much more reluctant to do so, if the host country is not willing to protect their IP.
- beckman466 5y ago"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. Adopting a historical approach, Dr Chang finds that the economic evolution of now-developed countries differed dramatically from the procedures that they now recommend to poorer nations. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing counties from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used." -- Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective source: https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb
- anandrew 5y ago> India’s copyright law is more progressive than many developed countries In developed countries, each update to copyright makes it more restrictive, not less. So maybe the right word isn't progressive, but regressive.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoYes, because the rich copyright monopolists are all located in developed countries and lobby their governments for laws that benefit them.
- alok-g 5y agoI see that the said clause excludes computer programmes. This brings an easy way around. Insert some scripts within the material to be protected. PDFs I believe can contain these.
- YeBanKo 5y agoIt is head spinning the the future of the US academic research depends on a renegade student in a adversary country and a foreign copyright law and court system.
- DarthNebo 5y agoAnother parallel issue is regarding public-funded work being paywalled for no reason, instead of being whole heartedly hosted by institutions rather than being presented only on request to authors.
- greenpresident 5y agoThis absolutely needs to become part of grant requirements. The NIH is doing well (and good!) on this, and the new German government has announced that software funded by the public needs to be free and research should be open.
- tikej 5y agoIn Europe this is required in European grants, but also in many country specific funding agencies as well. In 2018, 11 European research-funding organizations formed what is known as cOAlition S with the primary objective to ensure full, immediate, open access to all publications containing research data obtained in projects funded by its member agencies. The chief premises of cOAlition S were laid down in Plan S, which is scheduled for implementation in June 2020. So nowadays when someone wins grants from these agencies he’s required to publish his results in open access. It’s not ideal, because many people reserve grant money for open access fees but AFAIK the policy also allows to publish behind paywall as long as you provide publicly available copy in repository (institutional or public like arxiv etc). In my opinion the second option is much better (as it saves money), but not all journals allow to put copy of the article in public repos (sometimes they require that the public version is either before editor’s revisions or puts some time embargo, like a year or 6 months, for publishing final version of the article).
- refurb 5y agoAgain, it would be interesting if these academics just refused to publish in these journals. That would kill their business model very quickly. But they won’t.
- adrianN 5y agoRefusing to publish in a top journal is academic suicide. Why would any individual researcher do that?
- vasco 5y agoIf all the tenured professors published directly to arxiv only for a year, what would happen to them?
- Al-Khwarizmi 5y agoIn most fields, tenured professors coauthor their papers with their PhD students and/or early career postdocs. So what would happen is that they would be throwing those people, whose career depends on publishing in a hyper-competitive environment, under the bus. Apart from losing the funding with which one can renew contracts to students and postdocs, etc. As a tenured professor myself, I have thought about this often (1), but there's almost always someone more vulnerable that I would be harming with that decision. Honestly, this kind of discussion comes up very often, but it is really difficult, if not impossible, to get out of this situation via bottom-up action. Top-down measures for governments are pretty much needed for any meaningful change. (1) Actually, to be more precise, all my papers are already open-access, but many of them are in for-profit publishers that charge the author thousands of dollars to publish open-access, which in my view is also a parasitic model and a scourge for science like paying for subscription. The specific thing I've thought about is not publishing in any for-profit publisher at all, but anyway the shackles that keep us tied to publishers are the same in both cases (modulo whether you have funding to pay publishing charges or not).
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- aj_nikhil 5y agoOne solution can be to regulate the price of these journals so they are affordable and not cost exorbitant prices . Large scale might still keep it profitable for publishers and researchers.
- lngnmn2 5y agoYes, both of these sites are immensely valuable in the third world. You can have your copyright madness in the first.
- nitn 5y agoProps to Internet Freedom Foundation for taking up cases like this for the benefit of general public. They have been working on privacy & data security for citizens.
- einpoklum 5y agoAnother opportunity to state the obvious, which is: We should not let governments restrict the dissemination and copying of information - even if they codify it in law and threaten people with jail and fines. Copyrights (other than the right of attribution and such) are essentially a conspiracy of publishers' cartels, going back to 17th century British law: "An Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_1662 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Licensing_of_the_Press_Act_166... followed by the statute of Anne etc.
- pegas1 5y agoThe copyright -- as long as it serves the author, not to be stolen by the publisher -- is the only source of income to authors outside of the academic world. So, that part has to be preserved. And generally, authors should have a say about the use of their work. Only misuse of the copyright (actually a forceful possession) should be restricted.
- einpoklum 5y ago> So, that part has to be preserved. Even if everything else you'd said was true - your conclusion does not follow. A system in which the state enforces prevention of copying is an anathema and must be dismantled. The access of authors to copy-rent incoming does not justify its existence. > The copyright is the only source of income to authors outside of the academic world. That's not true, in two aspects. First, there are multiple other potential sources of income for authors of popular works. Second, most authors of most works don't make money off of the copyright anyway, as not very many people/organizations pay for copies. > And generally, authors should have a say about the use of their work. I disagree. Just like poets don't have a say about the use of their poems, so should the case be about articles, books, software, composed music etc. > as long as it serves the author, not to be stolen by the publisher IIANM, most copy-rent money goes to publishers, not authors.
- Siira 5y ago10 years should be enough for the authors. The current laws just serve the corporations. Besides, anyone wanting to use copyright for their creations should be mandated to publicly release the source (code, material, etc) of their product after the copyright ends.
- YetAnotherNick 5y agoI can't find much info about this case. What is this case about? Can government threaten anything other than DNS block here? Why is Sci-hub fighting this loosing case?
- pegas1 5y agoThe copyright laws need an update so authors are not kept hostage to journals. The amount of work and (almost no) money corporations put into running scientific journals is not proportionate to the power they get. Also the Antitrust Division of DOJ and the Bureau of Competition of the FTC should look into this. These companies do misuse the monopoly position and even collude and synchronise their actions. Authors have to publish in current journals, do not get paid and then are not allowed or limited in sharing their work.
- mtrycz2 5y agoIf you support better access to academic papers, please support one.surgery[0]. They have a new business model, where only the first X people to request a paper need to pay an amount to access it, after that the payment becomes optional. It's supported by cryptocurrency, so it's accessible to people without banking, if needed. (One of the most legit usecases for crypto I've found). [0] https://one.surgery https://one.surgery
- ISL 5y agoSerious question -- how is crypto more accessible to people without banks?
- Kbelicius 5y agoIt isn't. There are more people without access to internet than to a bank. Vast majority of unbanked are the poorest in the world and while they have access to a bank they have no need for it since they have nothing to put in it. If you want to help the unbanked you give them paying jobs. Idea that crypto somehow helps the unbanked is fiction.
- lenkite 5y agoNobody in China cares about Elsevier and nobody in India should either. Frankly, national research interests should trump some cushy Dutch billionaire corporation.
- AwaAwa 5y agoThe Dutch East India Company would beg to differ.
- Gentil 5y agoGentle reminder that these are studies funded by tax payers money. If America as a country has to deny non-americans access, it makes sense. Especially considering that China is abusing democratic institutions. But it is messed up that us Americans have to pay for it cos the middleman big corporates needs to make money out of it.
- thunkshift1 5y ago> America as a country has to deny non-Americans access it makes sense Stealing IP is definitely bad..But should access be denied to non-american academicians who spent, time effort and brain time to come with the findings in the first place?
- Gentil 5y agoI said "IF" America as a country has to deny, it make sense. Looking at the reaction, I don't think everyone read my comment fully cos they got triggered? Cos this is bad. They deny access to American people whose tax money paid for this. That in itself makes this argument of the company moot. This is nothing but companies making profit out of tax payers money. The whole system is messed up.
- FooBarBizBazz 5y agoNice. Maybe Western countries, realizing they look stupid in comparison, will follow suit. Now if only Westerners could learn from India how cheap generic pharmaceuticals can be...