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US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub (torrentfreak.com)
Sci-Hub, a scientific research piracy site home to thousands of research papers, has suffered another blow in a U.S. federal court. According to TorrentFreak, "The American Chemical Society has won a default judgment of $4.8 million for alleged copyright infringement against the site. In addition, the publisher was granted an unprecedented injunction which requires search engines and ISPs to block the platform." This comes after a $15 million fine was imposed on Sci-Hub by a New York federal judge earlier this year. From the report: Just before the weekend, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a final decision which is a clear win for ACS. The publisher was awarded the maximum statutory damages of $4.8 million for 32 infringing works, as well as a permanent injunction. The injunction is not limited to domain name registrars and hosting companies, but expands to search engines, ISPs and hosting companies too, who can be ordered to stop linking to or offering services to Sci-Hub. The injunction means that Internet providers, such as Comcast, can be requested to block users from accessing Sci-Hub. That's a big deal since pirate site blockades are not common in the United States. The same is true for search engine blocking of copyright-infringing sites.
"Ordered that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of ACS's trademarks or copyrighted works," the injunction reads.
"Ordered that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of ACS's trademarks or copyrighted works," the injunction reads.
Even worse. Rather than direct action on the offending party, this ruling assumes to force the cost of enforcement onto innocent third parties.
That should be, at a bare minimum, an unconstitutional 5th Amendment "taking."
And F the application of "taking" to only real property. It's extremely disingenuous to try to apply that to a case involving intellectual property.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The law is written by politicians and it's backed by force. Just because you don't think it's right doesn't mean squat. Run afoul of it and you will likely be sanctioned, especially when money is at stake and your opponents have deep pockets. Aaron Swartz realized this too late, when the law credibly threatened to put him in jail for decades, and he decided end his existence on his own terms instead.
Until you can convince a politician that you can personally benefit him, those that can (lobbyists - professional persuaders), and those that can bring money and votes to his benefit, he's not going to pay you a lick of attention. And seriously, how many outside of the academic community care about this? A handful of angry post-baccalaureates sure isn't going to persuade any pol to switch sides.
It's absurd that taxpayer funded research, done ostensibly for the advancement of society, is not available publicly. But it's the law. And until you can change the law, you're pissing into the dark. And somewhere in the dark is an electrified fence.
Try and change the law. But follow it until you can change it, cause brother, it got teeth. And it don't care what you think of it.
Yet many of the same scientists and the same university libraries that decry the barriers to access of the pay-to-play journals still feed the monster. Yes, yes, "publish or parish", and the library "must" carry these subscriptions. Or something like that.
The key will be to establish "open source" peer-reviewed journals that are backed by the biggest names in science and the major universities. That at this point it hasn't happened makes me think that the biggest names in science and the major universities like the way things are now...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
You go to a research computer, and access scientific journals online. A decent size library will have subscriptions.
And what they don’t have, you can get through intra library loan.
Good luck with that. Here's an example of how it works in the real world: At the start of the year I was six months deep into a big project when a very large study came out on the same subject. Naturally I needed a copy or my work would be sunk.
Neither of my two universities had a copy and none were available to loan.
Sometimes you can contact authors and get a copy, maybe a pre-edit one, but not in this case. It was a very-large group effort and the rights were not sufficient for any one person to give edit copies of the whole thing.
Four months later it landed on rental and purchase services. 24 hour access for 48 dollars. It was 300 pages long so that's a no. 120 dollars for purchase. It even was a physical copy, bound and fulfilled through amazon for some reason. But my budget does not allow for 120 dollar purchases for one citation when I'm expected to have closer to a hundred.
So I went to sci hub and downloaded it for nothing. They even had the graphs in full-color, something the hardcopy did not have, and an addendum for all the data and sources used.
Science is not some trivially easy or quick activity, but the people that do it must make it look easy and do their work quickly or be surpassed. I really don't understand why people make one-line comments here pretending to have first-hand knowledge of the process.
Many journals are cutting the print editions. It's kind of weird they lasted as long as they did. Many resources aren't available in the print version anyway. Online supplementary figures are very common, movies and programs are obviously not printable, and some journals are even putting additional text in "Supplementary" sections. Which makes no sense whatsoever in the online-only versions.
Also, you're assuming libraries have full access, which is nonsense. Why would journals give all access to public libraries?
Anyway, our tax dollars pay for the research. Researchers like those that access most of the journal articles volunteer time both in writing and in reviewing the research papers. Why the fuck shouldn't researchers be able to access the papers? The internet has made most of the useful functions of for-profit science journals obsolete, they're almost entirely parasitic now. There's no function they serve that outweighs researchers being able to access papers at our convenience.