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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.
Only in the land of the free you get fined 15 million for spreading illegal scientific information.
The system was bound to fail.
The system evolved to retard progress. How much faster would scientific development progress if everyone made all their data available to everyone else all the time, and right away? But everyone is forced to be concerned with getting personal credit for everything they do if they want to be able to secure additional funding later, so they hide knowledge away — at least until a later date. And that's to say nothing of the pressure to come up with something worth publishing, whether you really have something or not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The future of science and data science needs to be as easy as:
git clone http://whatsamata.edu/medical/...
make
Toss in the read me that you need to have this Siemens medical device attached to USB1 or some other such hardware setup.
The problem is that schools don't teach science, they teach data (that happens to be models about facts). The problem is that from the point of view of most of those listening, data is data irrespective of it being fact-based or not, as anyone who has memorized all the details about who did what in Game of Thrones can attest, so for most of them there's no qualitative difference between a list of scientific conclusions and a list of religious fantasies.
Want to really change things? Don't teach data, teach science. How to do it. Then challenge students by tasking them to study facts and make their own models. And then provide the actual scientific knowledge on the matter so they can confront what they did with what the true professionals did.
That's how they'll learn actual science and become permanently immunized against nonsense.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I agree with what you're saying, but I think it's the "publish or die" culture that is pervasive in academia that is the root cause here. The journals are just a highly visible artifact of the underlying problem.
It's not as if academics, including some very prominent ones, haven't been openly criticising the journal model and questioning its effectiveness for years. However, until the funding model catches up, many of those academics have their hands tied.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.