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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.
Universities are funded by public funds and all research papers should be freely available.
You can't blame them for trying.
The fact is that the journal model has gotten very bad. When reproducibility rates in some fields are below 50%, that whole secret-data-secret-programming-secret-fails peer review thing just doesnt work over the long run.
Journals exist entirely because of the journal model. They must defend it. Its self defense.
I predict that in the future that "publishing" will simply mean opening up your data and your scripts publicly, by adding them to a central repository. "Peer review" will be when someone else reproduces your work and also opens up their data and scripts publicly, and not at any other time. We will no longer trust a "peer reviewer" that doesnt reproduce. After all, the only reason right now to trust the peer review processes is the unfounded belief that people arent trying to fake it. The system was bound to fail.
"His name was James Damore."
If you think that's a joke, you have apparently misunderstood how government is supposed to work.
If the defendants in this lawsuit wrote a letter to the court for any purpose other than explaining why the court lacked jurisdiction, they were dumb and basically invited the court to issue a default judgment. They shouldn't be surprised when that happened. They can try to have the judgment vacated for lack of jurisdiction now, but it will be harder than if they contested it at the right time.
Right. That's why jerks who resort to violence and destruction to show how much better the liberal/progressive world view is ... tend to alienate ever more voters every time they have another violent tantrum. Every time progressive protesters block an ambulance from getting to a dying person, or burn a small business owner's only way of making a living, or decide to assassinate a bunch of legislators they wish hadn't won elections all across the country, they just set their own movement back even farther.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.