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Sci-Hub Faces $4.8 Million Piracy Damages and ISP Blocking (torrentfreak.com)
The American Chemical Society (ACS), a leading source of academic publications in the field of chemistry, accused Sci-Hub of mass copyright infringement and is demanding $4.8 million in piracy damages. "Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court," reports Torrent Freak. "As a result, a default was entered against the site, and a few days ago ACS specified its demands, which include $4.8 million in piracy damages." The complaint comes soon after the pirate site was ordered to pay $15 million in piracy damages to academic publisher Elsevier. From the report: "Here, ACS seeks a judgment against Sci-Hub in the amount of $4,800,000 -- which is based on infringement of a representative sample of publications containing the ACS Copyrighted Works multiplied by the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each publication," they write. "Sci-Hub's unabashed flouting of U.S. Copyright laws merits a strong deterrent. This Court has awarded a copyright holder maximum statutory damages where the defendant's actions were "clearly willful' and maximum damages were necessary to 'deter similar actors in the future.'" The publisher notes that the maximum statutory damages are only requested for 32 of its 9,000 registered works. This still adds up to a significant sum of money, of course, but that is needed as a deterrent, ACS claims.
Although the deterrent effect may sound plausible in most cases, another $4.8 million in debt is unlikely to worry Sci-Hub's owner, as she can't pay it off anyway. However, there's also a broad injunction on the table that may be more of a concern. The requested injunction prohibits Sci-Hub's owner to continue her work on the site. In addition, it also bars a wide range of other service providers from assisting others to access it. Specifically, it restrains "any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, to cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to [ACS's works]."
Although the deterrent effect may sound plausible in most cases, another $4.8 million in debt is unlikely to worry Sci-Hub's owner, as she can't pay it off anyway. However, there's also a broad injunction on the table that may be more of a concern. The requested injunction prohibits Sci-Hub's owner to continue her work on the site. In addition, it also bars a wide range of other service providers from assisting others to access it. Specifically, it restrains "any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, to cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to [ACS's works]."
But I am finding it hard to find a place in my heart to enable companies to "own" published scientific research. If you're a scientist and you publish your findings, it should be free. Period. That doesn't stop someone from commercializing the fruits of their research according to the opaque patent laws around the globe, but the actual scientific discovery ought to be public and free.
Best,
let them stack punishment on punishment on copyright violators and "pirates". punishments that will be increasingly unenforcible as more and more methods are found and used, both to evade punishments, and perpetrate the alleged "crime"
more an unjustifiable law is exposed as impotent, better it is.
original creators and discoverers should learn to be satisfied with creation and discovery itself and glory(if any). financial rewards should be confined to direct interactions(actual performance, talks, employment, etc ,)
I'm sure that the court action in a US court will have a huge effect on that Russian site, hosted in Russia, made by a Russian woman.
Or, you know, not.
Sci-Hub will continue to not give a shit what the random whinging of profit mongering science leeches like Elsevier and ACS. The world will collectively ignore the judgement and continue on reaping the benefits of free and open access to scientific research. And search engines will roll their eyes at requests to delete their indexes; hell, the corporations can't even get Google to stop indexing game and media piracy... do you really think they'll be able to deter the far less morally dubious 'piracy' that Alexandra's Sci-Hub encourages?
Just one more news article to pile on to the entire Barbara Streisand effect pile, just to make sure nobody is unaware of this awesome site.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I recently discovered sci-hub. The shear amount of knowledge accessible through it is astounding. These are things I'd never have had access to before due to location and financial reasons (some websites won't let me buy their stuff from my country, and I don't really have that kind of money to be flinging around paying for random papers and what not).
If we actually cared about our species as a whole, this sort of information would be freely available to those that seek it. I hope sci-hub can ignore these silly demands and continue improving their website. Fuck the ACS. They don't even sound like they were significantly affected by it.
.free the world's knowledge from these paywall-mongers for the betterment of personkind. How very dare she.
Requiem for the American Dream
And Streisand's themselves as the anti-humanity ghouls that they are.
Requiem for the American Dream
The published scientists are the enablers of this enterprise. It's time for them to make a stand and to publish only in open-access journals. I, myself, published a paper in an Elsevier journal four decades ago, long before the Internet, but I would never do this today.
But I am finding it hard to find a place in my heart to enable companies to "own" published scientific research.
They do not - they own the copyright on a paper. There is absolutely nothing to stop the author writing another paper with the same information and making that freely available. Indeed most papers in my field are preceded by a preprint on arxiv which is completely free.
If you're a scientist and you publish your findings, it should be free.
Agreed. The problem is that the reason that all these academic publishers exist has almost entirely vanished but there is a huge inertia in the system to change because many people's academic performance is evaluated based on where and how often they publish.
Personally, I think we need to go back to what we had before publishers took over. The current system grew out of scientific societies which would publish a regular bulletin based on letters from members who wrote in about a discovery they had made. As science took off the societies grew and printing thinker bulletins, more frequently with a larger circulation became a huge, expensive and time-consuming job given old printing presses. So the job was spun off to publishers who were good at doing this and they made their money to support the work by charging a subscription.
Today the journals need to be returned to the scientific societies which started them. The cost of publishing is basically nothing if you do it on the web and we academics already provide all the reviewing and correction of the content. The publisher is just involved in formatting and typesetting which is less important and easier to do if you publish online vs. a printing press.
They should have asked for the full $1,350,000,000 that the law allows. That would demonstrate how ridiculous it is to hold scientific knowledge hostage for payments to a publisher.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly? It is far from "basically nothing", especially in the aggregate. If you disagree, I challenge you to start and run your own high-quality publication for a decade in a financially responsible way. I have.
There are many options. It does have to get paid for, but copyright may not be the best way to do it--in fact, we know it isn't, because it restrict access to information that is literally there to advance human knowledge. Perhaps schools and individuals who wish to publish could subscribe to publishing cooperatives, for example.
In the alternative, scientific papers could more sensibly be treated like patents--a short period of monopoly, followed by public use.
The big problem is the politics of trying to get it done, not that there's any intrinsic preference for copyright-based pricing of access to scientific knowledge.
Real lawyers write in C++
In case the domain gets blocked, there is always scihub22266oqcxt.onion
You cede to the journal publication rights. Because of that you may only find drafts of papers on arxiv.
I think the "logic" is that they own it as they had some "experts" check it(for a cheque)..
Most journal reviewers don't get paid for their work. They own it because you cede the copyright.
In fact, the writer pays for the curation, editing process and reputation of the publisher.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly?
Same place the funding for the original research itself came from? Add the "cost of publishing" to the grant proposal.
And if it's publicly-funded at taxpayer expense, don't even THINK about putting the result behind a goddamned paywall.
As part of the scientific community who has published many articles, I can affirm that the above poster is exaggerating at best. Since the age of the word processor, the author does the lions share of the type setting. In fact, I have had articles sent back for revision if the type setting was wrong. So, I am not sure what all these high paid graphics artists are doing.
Now, I have also reviewed hundreds of articles. I guess I really did not get the memo, because I was not paid for a single one. Maybe in the above posters magical journal, they pay reviews, but in my experience it is a service that one has to do gratis, if they want grant money from a federal agency. If I am wrong, i am happy to send a bill
As for the rest of the arguments, all I can say is that circles are circular because they are circles. If one creates a system with an arbitrary number of cost centers at an arbitrary cost, then they can get an arbitrary value for their production fee. For example, many journals are located in DC or New York. While I am sure this is a lot of fun for the editor, it is not necessary. I am pretty sure in a world of interconnected supply chains, one could base in somewhere cheap like West Virginia, pay negligible rent and pay the editor less since it is a cheap place to live. Suddenly, the costs go down.
BTW, the editor's main job is to find reviewers and to see if the article fits the scope of the journal. Despite the title, there is very little editing of typos etc going on from that position. Some journals also have people do this gratis, for the ability to have a better chance to get grants, of course.
To put this in further perspective, the poster claims over $2000 per article. Using an example I know well, the journal of physical chemistry has about 30-40 articles per issue. So, this means each issue is costing 60-80K dollars. In comparison, a comic book has a break even point of about $20,000/issue. These are in full color, based in New York, and they have to pay all their artists and authors. Since a comic book costs about 3 dollars, this means they are doing this for less than the poster's journal, who gets all their material for free. Something doesn't add up.
Did I mention that the authors of the article have to pay to be published? Just saying...
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
because their jobs depend on having publications in high impact journals. basically, the tax payer pays them to make acs and elselvier a shit ton of money. Its also technically illegal aiui, because us government funded work (with the exception of patents) is supposed to be public domain.