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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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but vigilantes don't get to decide how that's done at the expense of other people's rights.
Right, we have the government for that.
You can't rob a bank to give the money to poor people,
Please tell us which law of physics prevents it.
and you can't infringe copyright just because you think those copyrights are being abuse.
Of course you can. It's called civil disobedience.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.'"
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.
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.