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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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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.'"
Fortunately Sci-Hub isn't based in the US, so can ignore this ruling. The court might attack its domain names, but can't do anything about Tor.
I guess the court knows this and is just obliged to make a ruling on the case before it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm afraid that it's called "theft", and is treated as such by the courts and by most people who actually _write_ and publish such papers. For most standards of civil disobedience, accepting the legal consequences is part of what makes it "civil" disobedience.
I'm also afraid there is an even more severe problem for scientific work. As best I can tell Sci-Hub makes _no_ effort to verify the content or authenticity of what they host. Such a loss of verification or of provenance of the data published endangers even the best of professional journals. and contributes to problems like this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
The result is that via unchecked content at places like Sci-Hub, the fake journals rise in search engine ranking and reinforce fraudulent or actively dangerous dangerous scientific claims. Similar problems exist for trade websites, such as https://www.stackoverflow.com/. Good answers get copied from elsewhere, edited down for simplicity or shortness by the copier, and vital safety steps are left out of the most popular answers. The results can be very dangerous when the shortened answers get applied in the field.
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.
Not exactly true. Hitler never won an absolute majority in the Reichstag, true. But Weimer Germany elected its parliament by proportional representation: nobody ever won an absolute majority. Governements were coalitions of parties, generally led by the largest party in parliament. And in 1933, that party was the Nazi party. Actually, the first go-round, nobody would form a coalition with them, and they had to go back for new elections, but the Nazis were the largest party again. This time the mainstream parties gave in, and formed a coalition government. As leader of the largest party in the governing coalition, Hitler had a right to be named Chancellor (prime minister, basically). There was some behind-the-scenes maneuvering to diddle him out of that (some people could see how dangerous he was), but it didn't work. Hindenburg named him chancellor because that was his ceremonial duty, but it really wasn't his choice. In summation, the Nazis did come to power because they were democratically elected to it. Didn't stay that way, of course.
Now that the domain names are blocked, here's the onion address
http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/
(Use the Tor browser to access the site)