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Judge Recommends ISP and Search Engine Blocking of Sci-Hub in the US (torrentfreak.com)
Sci-Hub, which is regularly referred to as the "Pirate Bay of Science," faces one of the strongest anti-piracy injunctions we have seen in the US to date, reports TorrentFreak. From the article: Earlier this year the American Chemical Society (ACS), a leading source of academic publications in the field of chemistry, filed a lawsuit against Sci-Hub and its operator Alexandra Elbakyan. Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court. As a result, a default was entered against the site. In addition to millions of dollars in damages, ACS also requested third-party Internet intermediaries to take action against the site. While the request is rather unprecedented for the US, as it includes search engine and ISP blocking, Magistrate Judge John Anderson has included these measures in his recommendations. Judge Anderson agrees that Sci-Hub is guilty of copyright and trademark infringement. In addition to $4,800,000 in statutory damages, he recommends a broad injunction that would require search engines, ISPs, domain registrars and other services to block Sci-Hub's domain names. If the U.S. District Court Judge adopts this recommendation, it would mean that Internet providers such as Comcast could be ordered to block users from accessing Sci-Hub.
But publicly funded research should be available to the public.
This would mean the blocking access to publicly funded science. This is a first ammendment violation. (this part of the ruling would be.)
The EU has already established judicial precedence by not only forcing google to police speech but to also remove peoplle and companies for the search results "to be forgotten".
Meanwhile, in the US, the industry has already self-regulated sites it dislikes, like Stormfront, proving they not only have the means to 86 a website they have the will to do so and the public, in general, agrees.
The US court is merely following precedent both judicial and in standard industry practice.
Usually what happens in just about every court proceeding is that the plaintiff's attorney files a motion usually leading to a hearing unless the parties settle the matter beforehand. During the court proceedings the plaintiff presents to the judge an order that they believe will resolve the issue. If the defendant doesn't show up (which is the case here) to contest the order that has been presented by the plaintiff, unless the judge really understands the order (which I suspect they may not understand the internet in this case), they may be inclined to use the plaintiff's proposed order and enter it as a default judgment. Otherwise, I'm not sure how a judge could have thought that this is an appropriate remedy to the issue. The judge is asking entities who are not parties to the case to perform actions that constitute the remedy.
We'll make great pets
everything has a dark underside
Isn't it only evil totalitarians that block their entire countries from accessing internet sites they don't like?
never heard of proxies and VPN's before. Hollywood has about zero luck stopping copyright violations the past 25 years, and these idiots will have the same level of luck.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
I mean, after all, what else is the job of a search engine, a social network, or an ISP but to ensure that information is well regulated, vetted, controlled, licensed, checked, filtered, screened, sliced, diced, and pureed?
Check your premises.
... and so the censorship begins...
The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers...
Sci-Hub, which is regularly referred to as the "Pirate Bay of Science,"
That is your problem right there. If SciHub was not maligned by idiots in the media who refer to copyright infringement as piracy, neglecting the fact that the public paid for the research, perhaps the judge would have a better understanding of this case.
If you don't like the result, you'll need a different argument, because while the Constitution only authorizes the federal government to do about a dozen pecific things, protecting copyright is one of those twelve things:
Article 1 - Section 8, powers of the federal government (clause 8):
âoeTo promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.â
You might advocate for a statute saying that any papers which in any way relate to any research which benefitted from any taxpayer funding must be placed in the public domain. The practical effect of that would be debatable and hard to predict, but it would be a cogent proposal. Pretending that the Constitution says the opposite of what it says in Section 8 is not a reasonable argument.
sci-hub is distribute via CloudFlare.
CloudFlare has already said they won't be the internet police, so they won't be blocking access.
Your local ISP (or not-so-local ISP monopoly) can try to block the CloudFlare IP for the site, but circumventing those kinds of blocks are kind of CF's bag- so good luck with that.
I gots me my teevee and thats all the science I needs. Science is done. Make them egghead nerds work for a livin.
Bomb the ragheads! Build a wall!
Has been preceded by an era of information hoarding and knowledge concentration to the extent that when the single point of distribution fails, so fails society.
Public-funding of science means the scientific output is public property. Outfits like Nature have been raking it in charging people outrageous subscriptions to access data that in vast majority of cases is connected/paid/dependent on public monies. That racket cannot last forever.
And when it comes to copyright, when does it stop with science? Is a classic like On the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox royalty-free given it was published in 1964? Does Alain Aspect owe the Bell estate royalties? This is all so much horseshit.
ArrrrrrrrrrrVPN.com
Requiem for the American Dream
Aaron Swartz did not die just to have this still happen.
Your comment is meant to be offensive, but it is actually insightful. Indeed, the majority of humans in the USA is treated as subhuman by their ultra-rich overlords. But hey, capitalism. Enjoy it, bitches.
You know what i've never seen anyone say, but that's sad/true? As someone who has access to journals legally, it's actually -easier- to find the articles i'm looking for through scihub a lot of the time.. how sad is that?
With the loss of net neutrality we are looking at a whitelist only to select from, provided you have paid the additional fees to even access approved sites. Didn't pay the $17.50/month for news aggregate sites? Well then no slashdot for you. Goodbye small business and other small sites, hello renting a template you just fill out and await approval before being charged a crap ton to be whitelisted. Don't like this model? Tough because not only will your opposing views be denied any public online forum, it will be illegal to compete against the monopoly in your area.
The ISP, search engine, etc are not a party to this and not within the judges authority. But lets just assume that this is valid and I'm mistaken (I could be). Then the issue is that the government has no power to order functionality be added (look at prior precedent, even before Apple and the orders to add a backdoor to the iPhone, or something like that). There is no censorship filter mandated in law in the US as is the case in many other countries. In the UK the government mandates it, in Canada all the large ISPs "voluntarily" implemented one on threat of violence (ie new law to mandate it), etc. If ISPs already had the censorship filters then the issue may not exist. The problem is they don't and can't be mandated to create or implement a censorship filter. Otherwise Apple could have been ordered to develop a backdoor.
I'm thinking along the lines of a DHT. Then you should be able to cobble up a DNS server that goes to the alternate system if lookup in DNS fails. Slightly easier than editing /etc/hosts.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
For an injunction to apply to a non-party (i.e., someone who did not get their proverbial day in court), that non-party has to be in "active concert or participation" with the defendant. There's a fairly accessible overview of the issue here.
Given the unlikelihood that ISPs and search engines are actively colluding with SciHub (or indeed treating them any differently than any other site out there), it would greatly surprise me if a court would find them to satisfy the above standard and hold them in contempt for not complying with the injunction.
Now, might they simply decide to comply with the injunction anyway to avoid the hassle of having to go to court to prove they shouldn't be subject to it? Absolutely. But that's more of a business decision than a legal one.
How dare the plebs attempt to actually LEARN something.
This should be spun as a tragedy.
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
"Having reviewed the Motion and the supporting documentation and determined that: (i) this Court has jurisdiction and service upon Defendant Sci-Hub d/b/a www.sci-hub.cc (“Sci-Hub”) was proper;"
I like to know how the court determined that. Sci-hub is registered to the Cocos, which is an Australian terrritory, and Alexandra Elbakyan isn't a US citizen.
So that judge thinks it's OK for publishers to claim copyright on public property that they didn't pay for?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
The people that would be visiting the site, will still easily be able to get to it anyway.
This 'order' is completely useless.
The US voted against the resolution because it called the death penalty a human rights violation IN GENERAL. In fact, the US supported amendments to get that part of the resolution removed and were shot down.
The US has many states where the death penalty is still legal, and used, so ANY support of the resolution would be hypocrisy on its face.
The homosexual angle is just being used as a pawn to rile up the masses.
And won't happen.
Always can go to Sci-Hub's Wikipedia page and check the latest links to the site or the TOR address.
Maybe the US should go all EU on it and make it a crime to view any science related website :|
Thatâ(TM)s right! This is America! Pay up or get a fucking job! No free lunch you damn commies! MAGA!!!!
Luckily, these are scientists, they know how easy it is to circumvent those laughable measures.
> I won't object if you do that with my papers.
You can allow people do to whatever with your papers. There are several Creative Commons licenses you might use, or the GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL).
That applies to YOUR papers. If your employer paid you to sit in their office and use their computer to write something for their use about their research, it may be their paper. Your right would be getting the pay check.
> Am I free to get a copy of these papers, and make a recording of them, and put that recording on YouTube?
Generally no, unless the license / author / copyright holder allows it. If you want to take someone's work and monetize it with YouTube ads, you'll have to talk to them about if they want to get a cut. An audio copy is a copy, and authors control who is allowed to publish copies unless it's fair use.
Fair use can get complex, but basically the idea is that if the new copy competes commercially with the author's authorized copies, it's probably not fair use. Again, if you want to take someone's work and monetize it with YouTube ads, you'll have to talk to them about if they want to get a cut.
You can do certain things that are considered fair, such as quoting a few sentences from someone else's book, in your own book or long-term video. You'd be selling YOUR book, which has it's own value, rather reselling their work without permission. The fact that your work quotes a few lines of theirs wouldn't be the main value offered.
One thing you are allowed to do is particularly relevant to research. You can write an article or make a video about the research and its results. You cannot just read the other person's paper out loud. If you're reading their words out loud it's still there words and they have copyright.
They do not have copyright on the facts. Facts are not protected by copyright. So you can read the research paper, then put it aside and then make a video telling us about what you read.
. . .Debbie Gallagher runs a pirate website devoted to distributing publicly-funded scientific literature. I'd've thought it'd be Lip.
That is a good argument you can make with your elected representatives. You can write to them about what copyright laws would most effectively promote progress of the Arts and sciences. You can tell them that if they vote for stronger copyright, you'll volunteer as part of their opponent's campaign.
It is not the province of the courts to decide which laws are effective, but how they should be worried in order to be most effective. The court, made up of judges appointed for life who will never answer to voters, has ruled that its own power is limited to the question of if Congress could think that the laws they wrote might further the objectives listed in the Constitution.
You may say you (and a thousand like-minded individuals) have little influence with a Congressman who will soon be up for re-election. To whatever extent that's true, you have even less influence with a federal judge appointed for life, so we probably don't want federal judges deciding which laws are best and most effective, only intervening if the Congressman (who will be facing re-election next year) CLEARLY passed a law with no possible connection to the purposes allowed by the Constitution.
They forget that there are thresholds
I do hope they understand they'll need to pay their guards more in the dark cyberpunk future they've forced on us, and that they'll never have adequate info-protection
You can suck on my fat dick you faggot.
Now I'm going to pirate from sci-hub
kthxbai
Judge sez: In USSA, only academic nomenklaturists are allowed to have scientific knowledge. Proles must remain ignorant - it's DUH LAW!
Pretty much every scientific paper published in the last twenty+ years is also on arXiv, usually formatted more nicely than the journal publication and with typos corrected when applicable. Moreover, if you want to read scientific publications, chances are you are employed by or a student of a university or a research institute, which usually have an unlimited subscription to a large number of journals.
... actually, no. Not at all.
It's interesting, it _sounds_ like the ACS is representing beleaguered authors of papers fighting to get their share of profits ($4.8 million in damages). The name includes 'Society' which makes it sound like a professional organization of chemists. But it isn't.
It's reasonable to assume that those authors are getting much wider distribution because their (in some cases) publicly funded work isn't hidden behind a pay wall. And that's why they try to get published.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Sound decisions, rational behavior, interests in helping those without, you know...solving injustices.
This "judge" wants to ban a site that literally has this on the front page:
"ScienceHu is a global science and technology publisher and provides free access to research articles and latest research information without any barrier to scientific community.
Our internationally recognized publishing program covers wide array of science and technology disciplines."
According to twitter these are Judge Anderson's qualifications: "Judge John Anderson (@judgejanderson). Father, husband, judge, domer, dukie, Disneynut, & chauffeur for travel baseball games."
Is there ANYONE with a lick of common sense anymore? Or is this just basically us admitting everything is never going to improve?
Factually wrong Comment gets +5
Accurate correction gets 0
Rambling orthogonal Response with typos +2 (apologies if ESL)
Moderation is broken.
How can this judge write a blanket injunction that effects thousands of companies? Isn't this a violation of the 5th amendment due process clause since none of the effected companies have been served with this lawsuit and given a chance to respond to it? I could also make the argument that this effects the average internet going individual, I haven't been served.
AC is modded down, but he's absolutely right. He didn't die in some sort of heroic sacrifice. He died because he paniced and was scared of being put on trial. I know we have a lot of cowards here who will happily mod us down for saying so, because really that's all they have the power to do, but he wasn't killed tied to a fence, or lynched, or tortured to death in prison. He chose suicide, the coward's way out.
Aaron Swartz may not have had to die. But unfortunately Bassel Khartabil was executed.