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Sci-Hub Ordered To Pay $15 Million In Piracy Damages (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Two years ago, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint (PDF) against Sci-Hub and several related "pirate" sites. It accused the websites of making academic papers widely available to the public, without permission. While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier's legal team, who obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall. The injunction ordered Sci-Hub's founder Alexandra Elbakyan to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. However, this didn't happen. Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit achieved the opposite. Sci-Hub grew bigger and bigger up to a point where its users were downloading hundreds of thousands of papers per day. Although Elbakyan sent a letter to the court earlier, she opted not engage in the U.S. lawsuit any further. The same is true for her fellow defendants, associated with Libgen. As a result, Elsevier asked the court for a default judgment and a permanent injunction which were issued this week. Following a hearing on Wednesday, the Court awarded Elsevier $15,000,000 in damages, the maximum statutory amount for the 100 copyrighted works that were listed in the complaint. In addition, the injunction, through which Sci-Hub and LibGen lost several domain names, was made permanent.
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I wonder if the "old dinosaurs" really know what is killing them?
Why do they keep ignoring science!
Only in the land of the free you get fined 15 million for spreading illegal scientific information.
what if it's only gotten right once & almost no one ever gets to sing along..? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odM5S3BZS-g
Well some take the easy solution. Being a pirate is easier than trying to change the system. You'll NEVER find a pirate changing the system the proper way. Just download, and if there's any change, it's by pure happenstance, and it may not even be the desired change.
I will squeeze blood out of these turnips.
Now do they get to play the "Aaron Schwartz" card, and hang themselves because they're afraid of being a skinny white boy in a federal penitentiary? Poor basement dweller can't deal with a real-world DA, poor me, boo-hoo-hoo, let's get a bunch of my fellow basement dwellers in Guy Fawkes masks to validate my pretension of social justice!
like the russians give a shit about the New York district court... #LOL
Elsevier is a fraud machine, and they should be begging people to lend them legitimacy by republishing papers they've published. The fact that they are not tells you everything you need to know about corruption in scientific publishing. They've done more than $15M in damage to the scientific process, let alone public health.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The music, film, software and video game industries has a LOT more power than the academic publishing industry and they are not doing very well, i think elsevier should take a page from their book.
Universities are funded by public funds and all research papers should be freely available.
who is having evolution removed from school text books because it is too ''controversial''. He wants ''all classes are to be taught in a more religious context'' — translation: ''I want future generations to make decisions on the basis of whatever fantasies that I want to promote; make them incapable of rational evaluation of evidence.''.
This can only result in a more unstable future world. We should eliminate religion from all politics; however I can't see that happening.
All matters they have jurisdiction over, they're obliged to hear and rule upon. It's the law, after all. Having said this, the Judge has limited jurisdiction- which means a limit of the enforcibility unless they can convince the jurisdictions covering SciHub where it's based to honor the judgements (Sometimes happens...but best of luck on that Elsevier...)
A Judge might (Emphasis there- realize that there's a limit to the scope...unless you agreed to the jurisdiction to the limits of the enforceability (i.e. things within the US, for example) they have no Authority to rule.) be able to order the domains to be seized but the money amounts? X-D That's not likely to happen.
Thing is? Judges do this all the time. What most don't get? A ruling outside of the enforcibility of the Court's jurisdiction renders the whole Void in the US.
Meaningless and it makes anything utterly ignorable by the party in question.
Is that really the market value of scientific knowledge? Who needs traditional facts anyway, now that we have alternative and renewable facts?
Real scientific papers should really be published, meaning public, probably under some open source license to make it clearly public.
Otherwise if papers are hidden behind paywalls, that's not really science.
People don't care. Government doesn't care.
Not here not anywhere except maybe some students in a university course.
The rest are oblivious or if aware they think it doesn't matter.
And maybe it doesn't. Who is affected by BIG PUBLISHING's stranglehold? Researchers that are not in an institution that pays subscription fees or that are behind an embargo/firewall etc. That's really not a lot of people in the big picture.
And what alternatives are there for those researchers in this day and age? Well, get in touch with the author of the paper of interest and ask for a copy. Why not?
Alternatively, why don't all authors make pre-prints available on their home pages? A publisher/publication typically requires a maximum 6-8 pages but every researcher has to trim the fat to achieve that. So publish the 'full' version on a home page and in arxiv.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Elsevier is a Dutch company. Fear the Hook of Holland!
Information wants to be free.
We need to move it to another country where it is safe from scum like Elsevier. If Elsevier keeps attacking our repositories, we should actually send people to eliminate them.
How about I make a one zillion dollar bill out of partialy used toilet paper and mail it to them??
Now that the domain names are blocked, here's the onion address
http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/
(Use the Tor browser to access the site)
E.U. member states agreed [last month] on an ambitious new open-access (OA) target. All scientific papers should be freely available by 2020, the Competitiveness Council - a gathering of ministers of science, innovation, trade, and industry -
concluded after a 2-day meeting in Brussels.
http://www.sciencemag.org/news...
What was Elsevier's revenue before and after scihub? My guess is they probably made even more money thanks to scihub. .. which in turn helps drive revenue for Elsevier even though scihub competes with it.
More dissemination of information the more quality science being published
Message from duh New York District Kangaroo Court: Fuck science - proles don't deserve knowledge!
It's DUH LAW.
Then why did they go to a US court? sci-hub is neither Dutch nor American, and the domains are only blocked in the USA, not in the Netherlands.
They're not doing all that well: when I worked for a subsidiary who, IMHO, was one of their cash cows, they always wanted more than 30% ROI because the rest of their business was disappointing.
davecb@spamcop.net
It is weird a court accepts to spend time on a case outside of its juridiction.
They are magazine peddlers that seem to sell something they don't fully understand, they keep pushing fake articles while more articles from them keep being retracted with bad consecuences to research.
It's a tangled mass of JS crap that I've never managed to get to work. They screwed up as simple as a search interface.
I think a lot of reactions here are a bit caricatured.
Evil journals are restricting the access to science. Every researcher is against them, but cannot fight the maffia system they established. The peer review is a flawed process, and unreproducible results are published. Let's destroy them !
Yet...
If authors are so much against the journal system, why don't they all publish preprints of their articles ? Most of the journals allow it.
If the peer review system is so worthless, why are articles changing so much between the initial submitted version and the final published version ?
A lot of people here are acting as if an article with results which have not been reproduced yet was worthless. Have they really been in any contact to the field of sciences ? One of the points of the peer review is to make sure that enough details are given on the experimental conditions and analysis methods, so that the experiment can be reproduced. But this might be the point of another article, by another team, at another time... Progress works like this.
If most articles have a "prior work" section that reviews the state of the art, it is not just to fill pages so that the journal can charge more. This is to present if the findings are new, and by definition have not been reproduced yet by other teams.
So for one thing, Islam doesn't draw the same distinction between religion and state that we do. But as to these suicide bombers, well, a few centuries ago there were some pretty civilized Islamic empires in that part of the world. Western countries fixed that. And the last time that anyone tried to set up a progressive Islamic government, however, they started getting uppity about owning their own oil, and the CIA staged a coup and installed a friendly dictator. People got that message loud and clear.
Maybe if we stop bombing these guys back to the Stone Age and trying to dictate their politics they'll stop being violent fundamentalists.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
You have to pay quite some money to read journals, but you have to pay for publishing in them as well. It is as if science was a crime, and you get fined for doing it.