[HN Gopher] How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its firs...
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How Indian lawyers, scientists gave Sci-Hub its first legal defence
team
Author : sixtyfourbits
Score : 228 points
Date : 2021-09-20 13:27 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.careers360.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.careers360.com)
| godelmachine wrote:
| I wish there was a way I could financially support Sci-Hub.
|
| The only impediment is they accept cryptocurrency and I am too
| lazy to get well versed with it. Not forgetting to mention the
| prices are currently through the roof, and TBH unaffordable for
| me.
|
| But just like I regularly support Wikipedia and USENIX with
| modest but periodic donations, I would like to support Sci-Hub as
| well.
| commoner wrote:
| > Not forgetting to mention the prices are currently through
| the roof, and TBH unaffordable for me.
|
| Cryptocurrencies are divisible into tiny fractional units, so
| you don't have to buy a whole unit of a cryptocurrency to use
| it. While it is a small hassle to convert your currency to
| cryptocurrency before sending it, if you use an exchange like
| Coinbase, it's not much harder than transferring money to a
| different bank/investment account.
| maccard wrote:
| > it's not much harder than transferring money to a different
| bank/investment account.
|
| Yes, along with all the KYC requirements that coinbase
| require, just like my investment account does. Meanwhile the
| bar for services like Pateron, paypal, shopify, etc is one
| click and done.
| anthropodie wrote:
| Suppose SciHub looses cases in multiple countries and has to
| shutdown. What prevents someone from putting entire data as
| torrent?
|
| Piracy is result of unfair prices. Music used to be pirated all
| the time but then Spotify came along with subscription based
| services. I don't know anyone who still pirates music. Maybe
| people with IP and copyright claims should learn from Music
| industry.
| xtracto wrote:
| MP3 art shared by napster is different from Knowledge shared by
| SciHub in that the former was financed privately by record
| companies while the latter is funded by state taxes (i.e.
| public money).
|
| At the current state of affairs, Scientific Publishers can be
| reduced as "curators" of public research publications. They may
| work very well at that (i.e. reading something from Nature, or
| from JAMA has its prestige) but there is no reason why they
| should gate the knowledge behind paywalls. They should offer
| their "curation/selection" services, dedicated to create
| lists/collections of scientific articles already published
| elsewhere for free.
| jhgb wrote:
| > What prevents someone from putting entire data as torrent?
|
| What do you mean by that? It's _already_ a bunch of torrents on
| the official SciHub page.
| xrisk wrote:
| Can you point me to these torrents please? I can't seem to
| find them.
| jhgb wrote:
| If you look at https://libgen.rs/scimag/, on the top left,
| there's Download -> Torrents.
| sampo wrote:
| https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-
| downl...
| pradn wrote:
| Yes, these torrents hold hundreds or thousands of articles
| each. You can help preserve them by downloading and seeding
| them.
| yashwastaken wrote:
| But pirating music is different from streaming it on some
| application. Like you don't own the music file you're just
| streaming it from some servers(in case of downloading you still
| need the app and can't share it to some other device).
| martin_a wrote:
| I don't think that matters.
|
| Everybody had a bunch (or thousands) of MP3s because mobile
| phones weren't a thing, fast mobile connections weren't a
| thing and there was simply no infrastructure to have
| something like Spotify.
|
| If we'd have Spotify with everything in 2003, we would not
| swap hard drives in school breaks.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I was a subscriber to "Yahoo music unlimited" in 2005 and
| transferred my DRM'd WMA files to a zen micro with a 4GB
| spinning disc.
|
| granted, i never met anyone else at school doing the same
| thing.
| adamc wrote:
| I am not convinced music prices were "unfair" -- they were
| higher than people wanted to pay. There is a distinction.
| scns wrote:
| Hm, unfair to whom. Do you know how much the artists actually
| receive?
|
| There are clauses from the days of shipping vinyl to record
| stores, regarding breakage of disks. The label keeps a
| percentage (5% - 10% can't remember correctly), for broken
| disks. They still use these clauses decades after they have
| <edit>lost</edit> any basis in reality.
|
| The Police financed the recordings themselves, to get higher
| royalty percentages.
|
| Have you read about majors suing artists for damages after
| their albums flopped?
|
| How much do the people earn that made the music in the first
| place?
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-
| keati...
|
| https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/12/06/zoe-keating-
| spot...
|
| Further reading here, published 21 years ago:
| https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
| danuker wrote:
| What is a fair price? There is no such thing.
|
| An economically optimal price is one that maximizes total
| profit.
|
| If it's too high, fewer people will buy the product, which
| might reduce profit. If it's too low, the profit margin will
| be small in spite of lots of units sold.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Only if you assume humans are purely self centered rational
| agents. In practice, many people do care about what a
| "fair" price is and don't just charge as much as possible
| in pursuit of profit.
| belltaco wrote:
| We are talking about music, not insulin. There's probably
| hundreds of millions of different songs including the
| ability to listen for free on radio with ads, YT etc.
| adamc wrote:
| This is an absurdly limited point of view. If I charge 3x
| as much as other vendors, then force them to raise their
| prices by firebombing businesses that don't comply, it
| might (conceivably) maximize profit, but most people would
| think it unfair, largely because it was founded on unfair
| restraint of trade.
|
| I don't think the prices on music were unfair before. No
| one has to have music, and there was no evidence that the
| prices were enforced by unfair practices. They were just
| higher than people wanted to pay.
|
| But most people would say that Enron's manipulation of
| energy markets was quite unfair.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What is a fair price? There is no such thing_
|
| It's subjective, but that doesn't make it nonexistent. I
| pay $10/mo. for Spotify. I'm happy with that. I think I get
| great value for that money spent. If someone came out with
| an $8/month streaming service, I'd scrutinize it fairly
| closely before contemplating switching.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It's subjective, but that doesn't make it nonexistent.
|
| Yes, it does. Subjective assessments have no objective
| reality.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Subjective assessments have no objective reality_
|
| Subjective assessments drive political preferences and
| policy, to say nothing of human relations and
| experiences.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Hallicinations of the expressed wishes of divine figures
| do that, too.
|
| Still doesn't make those figures, or their wishes, real.
| Beliefs about fair prices exist, fair prices themselves
| do not.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Are you actually saying that you would refuse to use a
| service (all other things being equal) that was $8/month
| because $10/month is what you think is "fair?"
|
| If so, I'd mark that behavior as strange, and not
| actually evidence of the existence of a "fair price."
| There's no way this behavior is typical.
|
| If what you're saying is that you'd assume a price lower
| than $10/month would have other, unseen problems, then:
|
| 1) You're not referring to a "fair price" but instead a
| _believable_ price, which is a compromise between what
| you want to pay (which is nothing) and what you estimate
| to be the price of delivery, and the odds with that price
| in mind that what you receive will be adulterated /lower-
| quality than advertised.
|
| 2) How is $10/month fair? No wonder musicians don't make
| any money.
| dqpb wrote:
| > An economically optimal price is one that maximizes total
| profit.
|
| The economically optimal price is the one that maximizes
| total value in the long run.
| caslon wrote:
| Shutting down isn't actually on the table here. In the best
| case, _she wins._ In the worst case, she goes back to her post-
| USSR nation that doesn 't really care about international
| copyright law and continues to ignore international copyright
| law.
| creamynebula wrote:
| Pirating music remains lively on the private tracker scene
| rramadass wrote:
| >"The way the publishing industry is functioning is unethical.
| Though what Alexandra Elbakyan is doing is illegal she is
| countering an industry that is working unethically,"
|
| 100% agree with this; Though i would dispute that what she is
| doing is "illegal". When the deck is completely stacked against
| you, going outside the rules is not "illegal".
|
| Every rational, educated person on this planet _should_ support
| free access to Knowledge if we are to achieve a fairer,
| egalitarian society.
|
| More power to Sci-Hub, LibGen and their brethren !
| KarimDaghari wrote:
| Isn't this double negation? If what the industry is doing is
| unethical and what Alexandra is doing is considered "illegal"
| in the eyes of that industry... wouldn't that make it actually
| legal and ethical?
| SuoDuanDao wrote:
| I think it's quite important to distinguish between 'legal'
| and 'ethical'. What Alexandra is doing is illegal and
| ethical. If we don't view those two as separate it becomes
| way too easy to excuse unethical behaviour on the basis of
| 'just obeying the law'
| judge2020 wrote:
| > When the deck is completely stacked against you, going
| outside the rules is not "illegal".
|
| Yes it is. Things are "illegal" when they're in the law book,
| regardless of which law they're breaking and what they're
| standing up for.
| frenchy wrote:
| In most places, and certainly in places that practice "common
| law" and democracy, part of what makes something legal is its
| moral acceptability. The laws on the books exist to reflect
| that and to make things function efficiently and fairly.
| Without that, laws are simply a tool of violence and
| oppression by the authorities (or the majority, in case of a
| democracy) against their population.
|
| That's why we have juries of peers, and the ability of a jury
| to say "this person did the thing, but they shouldn't be
| punished for it".
| salawat wrote:
| Hence why jury nullification scares the ever loving crap
| out of the Justice system. Binding precedent is created by
| the Jury, which throws a wrench into the works that for
| some reason is seen less acceptable or "official" than a
| prosecutor exercising prosecutorial discretion.
| gpm wrote:
| Jury nullification does not create binding precedent.
| salawat wrote:
| That only makes things even more hilarious, because now
| the Justice system can't even claim to be consistently
| applying _stare decisis_ across the board if that is the
| case.
|
| Rather it only does it when someone makes the decision
| that to do so is convenient for maintaining the integrity
| of the Judicial system; thereby creating the facade that
| the entire thing isn't rife with capricious singularities
| like it actually is.
|
| When laws are impossible to consistently enforce (as
| evidenced by prosecutorial discretion), or juries are not
| on board with seeing them enforced, it should be a much
| more blatant signal something is up or off than it is.
|
| In fact, is there even a record of cases of "refused
| prosecutions"? If not, maybe there should be. Then
| there's be an objective metric to analyze to see if a law
| is being abused selectively.
| autoliteInline wrote:
| >Things are "illegal" when they're in the law book,
|
| Probably oughtta get the Kazakhstani Disney police right on
| it.
| yardie wrote:
| In quite a few US states anti-miscegenation laws are still on
| the books. You would hardly find a lawyer or judge to take
| the case but most haven't been removed, yet. If you told a
| interracial couple that what they are doing is "illegal"
| you'd rightly be laughed at.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Still on the books is different from still having force of
| law. Supreme Court's Loving v. Virginia voids all
| miscegenation statutes whether they are repealed or not.
| CheezeIt wrote:
| That's because there's case law.
| justinator wrote:
| s/defence/defense/
| justinator wrote:
| Thank you, I've been corrected.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Also, center in british english is centre.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Captchas are the worst for this as a native British English
| speaker since they tend to be automotive, which is an area
| where British and American English differ wildly. Some are
| fairly self-explanatory because of how literal the American
| English terms are (pavement vs sidewalk, zebra crossing vs
| crosswalk) but some are a bit more arcane (central
| reservation vs median, bonnet/boot vs hood/trunk).
| cogman10 wrote:
| The correct spelling of defen(c|s)e is regional (as are many
| English words).
| belltaco wrote:
| Not really. https://proofreadmyessay.co.uk/writing-
| tips/spelling-tips-de...
|
| India uses British English.
| BoxOfRain wrote:
| Not all English is American English, in countries influenced by
| British English defence is often the correct spelling.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| why? what is the "benefit of elsevier"? beyond holding copyright
| to the work of others which they give away for free, what value
| addition does elsevier bring to the table that cant be done
| otherwise? if the argument is that they provide classification
| and other stuff, why cant you just dump everything on schihub and
| let people do the organization themselves?
|
| remember a few hundred years ago, horse drawn carts were a big
| business but cars drew them to extinction. should we bring back
| horse drawn carts monopoly of the old just because they were
| something once?
|
| on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing on
| scihub directly?
| ausbin wrote:
| > on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing
| on scihub directly?
|
| Many compsci/physics/math researchers already submit preprints
| (or post-prints even) of their papers to arXiv, which is
| public: https://arxiv.org/. I'm confused, is there a reason why
| they should they submit to Sci-Hub too?
| Y_Y wrote:
| They're not always quite the same, often arxiv have doesn't
| updates reflecting changes during the publication process
| (not including formatting). Can be annoying, the can be
| subtle differences and people aren't really careful about
| which versions they use or cite.
| pkaye wrote:
| > on a sidenote, why arent authors and researchers publishing
| on scihub directly?
|
| Because Elsevier own prestigious journals that authors want to
| publish on. Its like saying why compete in the Olympics when
| you can compete in your local races.
| cheeko1234 wrote:
| Multi-billion dollar international team of lawyers vs a bunch of
| young volunteers!
|
| I'm rooting for the little guys...
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