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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?
Only in the land of the free you get fined 15 million for spreading illegal scientific information.
I will squeeze blood out of these turnips.
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.'"
People are best sticking to what they are best at. Personally I would be no good at trying to "change the system the proper way", it requires too much speech-making on your feet and political networking. I am much better at firing barbs at the existing system.
Alexandra Elbakyan is a she, so not a 'skinny white boy'. And unless this publisher can afford to send Mossad-style hit squad to Russia to kidnap her and bring her to the US, she won't spend a day in prison or pay a dollar of those damages, and she'll continue hosting pirated scientific papers because who's going to stop her? Not Putin, that's for sure. You silly Americans, always thinking your courts have jurisdiction outside of US borders. Newsflash - they don't.
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.
Damnit why do people keep saying this.....Hitler never won a government election. He was appointed to Chancellor by Hindenburg, the guy who beat him in the presidential election.
Godwin would be proud.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
You might fire barbs at the existing system, but the existing system has howitzers, and isn't afraid to use them to return fire.
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.
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.
Aaron was never convicted of anything. He was a troubled kid that already had issues, and faced _up to_ a lot of years in jail. He may have been given something like an 18 month sentence with credit for time already served .. etc.. maybe would never set foot in the general population of a federal prison (btw: the federal prisons are the easier ones...)
You see the same thing in poker tournaments, all-be-it for much lower stakes. For some players the pressure builds and builds and then all of a sudden, all at once, they do something to release the pressure. They bring their evening to a resolution. Either they bust out right now for no good reason or they get lucky and accumulate a lot of chips (which also releases the pressure.) Their evening moves from out-of-control to under-control via the (attempted) "tournament suicide."
You see it on the battlefield. That guy that just can't take the pressure of a situation. Brings it all to a resolution without any critical thought.
While the poker players do it to "bring their evening to a resolution", Aaron killed himself to "bring his life to a resolution." He lost control of his fate and did what some people instinctively/subconsciously do when that happens.. he took control back. Just like some poker players. Just like some soldiers during war.
I don't see how the Aaron Swartz situation is at all applicable here aside from the content being the same. Aaron (allegedly) did shit like break into closets. AFAIK the only crime these sci-hub folks have ever been accused of is copyright infringement, not breaking and entering, not hacking, not vandalism, not theft of service, etc. Aaron piled it on.
"His name was James Damore."
WRT the RIAA/MPAA
These folks are not playing the game that you think they are playing. They are rent seeking and its not new for them. The software/game industry is another thing. While there exists an anti-piracy software association, it really is concerned with the misguided attempt at ending the piracy of the products and this association does not speak for the industry. The RIAA and MPAA on the other hand DO speak for their respective industries. They *are* their respective industries, and I think that might be even on by-writ legal basis where these two associations represent even companies that dont want to be represented by them and never signed up to be represented by them, although I may be missing a separation here where its only ASCAP that enjoys this legal status.
RAAA/MPAA seeks to leverage the fact of piracy for financial gain. Not true of that dumb software association.
Many countries put a tax on blank media and send the money to the RIAA and MPAA, "because piracy." Rent seeking. Not the same as software/games at all.
"His name was James Damore."
Is that really the market value of scientific knowledge? Who needs traditional facts anyway, now that we have alternative and renewable facts?
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!
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...
Someone who comments as an anonymous coward really shouldn't be condemning anybody else for not wanting to face consequences.
Message from duh New York District Kangaroo Court: Fuck science - proles don't deserve knowledge!
It's DUH LAW.
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.
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.
Obviously this didn't matter. Some countries like the UK have different laws.
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.