Slashdot Mirror
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.
So the only people that cant freely benefit from these U.S. science papers are U.S. citizens.
"His name was James Damore."
Try the library
Have you ever actually done that?
As an academic researcher, no single library can afford even a quarter of the journals a researcher might need in their field.
Do you know what grad students do to get their degree? Cheat. They use abstracts and hope nobody notices or they go to places like above and get the information they need illegally.
The problem has only become worse as journals increase their rates, their number, and universities providing fewer subscriptions every year.
It's as if the only people that post on higher-education articles either have their hand in the pot or are uneducated themselves.
You go to a research computer, and access scientific journals online. A decent size library will have subscriptions.
Before Science, discoveries where kept private as secret property for power and profit.
That was called Alchemy. As "Intellectual property" monopolies continue to expand, we will naturally continue to regress towards a similar state of stagnation relative to our potential.
For all the reasons I explained in my post when the magistrate judge's decision came out, this order likely cannot apply to ISPs, search engines, etc., because they weren't involved in the lawsuit (i.e., didn't have their proverbial day in court), and aren't in "active concert or participation" with Sci-Hub.
Sure enough, the actual decision here says: "ORDERED that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including [basically every player involved in providing internet services], cease facilitating access...."
This is basically like saying "everyone to whom the injunction applies must obey it (if ACS can prove they knew about it)," which pretty much says nothing.
First, no individual ISP, search provider, DNS provider, etc. etc. is obligated to do anything until ACS provides them with legal notice of the injunction or otherwise proves they actually saw it (ACS can't just say "Your Honor, it's been all over the news -- they HAD to have heard about it").
Second, ACS would have to show that the party was not just agnostically providing access to / search results for / DNS records for / etc., Sci-Hub just like any other website, but that the party was actually colluding with Sci-Hub. ACS would be very unlikely to be able to do this in my view, and it would be expensive for them to try (some of the smaller players might just fold to avoid the bother, but the larger ones are unlikely to want to set a precedent of just rolling over and implying they're subject to a court order in a case to which they were not a party and had no opportunity to defend their interests).
In short, any blocking would be strictly voluntary, and I'd be fairly surprised if we see a whole lot of that.
Free speech is the freedom for YOU to speak. It doesn't mean that everyone else has to give you everything they write for free.
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.
Try the library ... It's a great place to get access to all sorts of scientific journals.
I was looking for just one recent article in Science recently.
I tried the libraries - all that I could reach without cutting work. (I work at a startup, with weird and extended hours, which eliminates, for example, those at Stanford U that are accessible to non-students).
Nobody had budgeted for the service, so the paper wasn't available.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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.
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.
Have you ever tried that one? When I was looking at getting some papers that way, I was told it'd be a 6 week wait (for electronic copies) if you're lucky and things go fast. You are are dependent on a library accepting your request, and overall the system seems to be designed with the assumption that nobody using it might actually have any need for any information in a timely manner. (The one time I did use it, it was for something I wanted to read for my own reasons, and I would not have been able to check its status--basically, the only thing I'd get is notice of when it came in. I don't even know if there is a fail state--or if my request would linger in the system until the heat death of the universe if nobody accepted it.)
ACS could do a lot by having access to the papers it owns be cheap or even free to members--and making sure students who could join are aware of this particular benefit.
Every few years Senator Cornyn (R Texas) introduces a bill requiring federally funded research to be made available to freely online. Every few years, the fine folks who post on Slashdot ignore the bill, as does everyone else other than the publishers who oppose it. Every few years the bill dies with no broad support from the public.
Next time Senator Cornyn introduces the bill, please send a quick email or phone call to your senators and house reps, supporting the bill. Thanks.
Speaking from experience many academic libraries cannot afford the extortionate fees charged by the journals. As far as community libraries go, I recently went into one and asked them if I could access Nature or Science and they laughed at me. And it was the largest community library for about 10 miles.
Try going to community college and trying to write a paper that relies on articles from journals that it does not subscribe to. Even Harvard says it cannot afford the fees. It's a classic case of abuse of IP. https://www.theguardian.com/sc...
The problem is only getting worse. And if you are not affiliated with an academic institution you are screwed. Some university libraries won't even let in members of the public and you invariably need a university login to use the computers if you are able to freely enter. http://www.dailytexanonline.co...
The general price of consumer goods went up by 73 percent between 1986 and 2004, but the price of serials increased by 273 percent, according to Tufts University. Congress gets big campaign contributions from the publishers so there is no realistic option for those who want to access research they already largely payed for via taxes. Unless you come with a realistic alternative you cant criticize sci-hub.