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Sci-Hub 'Pirate Bay of Science' Blocked In Russia Over Medical Studies
UK academic publisher Springer Nature has filed a complaint against Sci-Hub, a site that provides open access to scientific research papers. "The Moscow City Court was told that Sci-Hub is infringing the company's copyrights and should, therefore, be subjected to blocking," reports TorrentFreak. "Listing 'bulletproof' hosting company Quasi Networks and U.S.-based CloudFlare as facilitating access to the site, Springer Nature complained that three specific works were being made available illegally by Sci-Hub." From the report: As the above table obtained from the Court shows, the research papers cover topics of interest to the medical community in the spheres of heart and brain health -- Effect of glucose-lowering therapies on heart failure, Nitric oxide signaling in cardiovascular health and disease, and Lactate in the brain: from metabolic end-product to signaling molecule. These would ordinarily sit behind paywalls but thanks to Sci-Hub, their contents are available for everyone to absorb for free. It's a situation that's unacceptable to Springer Nature and the Moscow City Court was sympathetic to the company's complaints. As a result, several Sci-Hub and Library Genesis domains (gen.lib.rus.ec, www.libgen.io, scihub.unblocked.gdn, lgmag.org, libgen.unblocked.gdn, sci-hub.tw and libgen.io) are now being rendered inaccessible by Russian Internet Service Providers.
This is Russia, they're down until someone pays the appropriate people more than Springer's fixers did, or an agency gets into a turf war with the one who facilitated the blocking, or one of a million other things that decide how things work in Russia goes into effect.
I hope Springer also bought the Whac-a-Mole brand, because the benefit to that brand from this court decision is probably going to be more significant than the benefit to Springer directly.
Will they never learn?
Effect of glucose-lowering therapies on heart failure
This study seemed interesting, so I downloaded the paper from sci-hub to check it, but disappointingly it only talks about using drugs to lower glucose, rather than the obvious therapy of removing glucose and starches from the diet.
But it's a city court. Should a ruling from just a city court affect an entire country this way?
It depends on who was sending the signal to whom. Don't think of it as a legal ruling, think of it as someone sending a message. Presumably it reached the intended recipients if an entire country was affected.
Of all the times for Russia to enforce another country's copyright laws, this was an odd choice. A lot of students in less financially sound countries don't have access to the latest publications, which are kept paywalled behind exorbitant fees, so they need Sci-Hub. What other choices do they have, pull $40 out their ass to skim a paper, a paper what was paid for by some country's tax payers which the journals now profit off of, that may or may not even be relevant to what they're looking for? Then do that again a hundred times over? Get real.
I notice that the second paper has an author at University of Louvain in Belgium and the third at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, so clearly, tax payer dollars already went into the listed works. I'm all for copyright laws protecting the rights of artists, writers, musicians, and the like, but the situation in scientific publications is just ridiculous. The journals are just using all the means they can to hold onto their bygone cash cow, to everyone else's detriment.
How are sanctions isolating Russia from published cutting edge research? Access isn't so expensive that main universities won't be able to pay it. Russia is still a fairly wealthy state by world standards, and it still conducts cutting edge research in many fields.
This is just their ongoing anti-piracy drive, that works pretty much the same that it works in the rest of developed world. Copyright holder complaints about infringing site to the court, court makes orders according to powers granted to it by local copyright legislation.
I'm waiting for the day those scientific publishing barons are recognized for the parasites they are and are driven out of their comfy places. Springer, Elsevier, all of you.
In this case "open" means "unrestricted" in sense that sci-hub itself doesn't attempt to restrict access to it based on social class like Springer does.
Sci-Hub provides access to truly open material as well, so nothing wrong with the wording. It matters because people say similar things to justify blocking torrent sites simply because they too provide access to protected material and we all know there are many legitimate uses for BitTorrent. I don't think website operators should be forced to censor or filter protected materials, especially when laws can be drastically different in various jurisdictions.
Only the affluent and well-connected DESERVE access to to scientific knowledge. You don't want the deplorable proles thinking for themselves, do you?!
"Springer: making the world more ignorant, one repressive lawsuit at a time!"
We could sever all physical cables, connections, and channels, with Russia, and absolutely nothing of value would be lost. The same goes for China.
These nations are nothing but sewers of online criminality, scam artists, crackers, and losers who contribute nothing worthwhile to open source technology, and otherwise devote their energies to stealing IP, credit card numbers, identities, passwords, etc. To be more specific, if everything East of Germany, and everything in China and SE Asia was purged from the Internet - it would be no loss. I doubt businesses would lose anything, since these places wouldn't pay for anything in any case, and only offer a handful of useful export sites. Until they adjust their attitudes, they should be treated as human spam, and the internet should route around them.
I suspect a lot of sysadmins already block countries wholesale, since they generate nothing but spam.
I will give one good argument for your 'should'. Quoting from the last Nature Reviews paper in the list above:
Research in P.J.M.'s laboratory has been supported over the years by the Swiss National Science Foundation, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST; Saudi Arabia), the University of Lausanne (UNIL; Switzerland), École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL; Switzerland), Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV; Switzerland), the National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) Synapsy and the Préfargier Foundation
Clearly Nature is paywalling, at least partially, publicly funded research results.
But it's a city court. Should a ruling from just a city court affect an entire country this way?
Of course, that's absolutely normal. If you are a company in Little Rock, Arkansas, and illegally distribute materials all over the USA, you can be sued in the town court in Little Rock, Arkansas. They don't have to sue you in an Arkansas state court, or in a Federal court, or if you sold worldwide, take the case to the UN.
Always use sci-hub, even when your institution has access to the article. It's just easier and much faster.
Knowing that you might cause a small loss of profit for those 'scientific publishing' companies is just a plus.
Those f*ckers deserve it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
Maybe Russia is simply telling the west "leave us alone to fuck up the Ukraine and you will have one less IP pirate to worry about".
Multinationals might find that a good deal.
gen.lib.rus.ec DOWN, www.libgen.io DOWN, scihub.unblocked.gdn DOWN, lgmag.org DOWN, libgen.unblocked.gdn DOWN, sci-hub.tw DOWN, all down for good
In unrelated news, proxy and VPN use is UP.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Springer's one of the greedy publishers that take papers, many produced with public funding, and locks them away from all but subs. We paid for the stuff, so should be free to us.
Thanks, Russia!
It isn't :
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/
Stolen? Did someone lose those papers are were unavailable to others just because they were on sci hub?
Just imagine if Mendel's work was behind a paywal and a row of patents. That companies are abusing everyone and the governments are allowing it is a disgrace to Humanity.
Comparing dissemination of scientific knowledge to illegally copying a fucking MP3 is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
It may be long past time to eliminate "intellectual property" as a legal concept, since it amounts to government enforcement of business models that are no longer viable in a true free market. If your company relies on being able to exclude world-wide access to a random configuration of bits in a file, then maybe you should find some other way to add value to society that doesn't try to defy the laws of physics.
The detriment of copyright seems to be overriding the benefits these days.
It's about time people overhaul the system or break it apart.
The terms you're talking about are quite universal in developing world. Here in your western neighbour of Finland, system was very similar when I was still in university. Iirc, it worked the same way in UK and Germany (pricing varies).
... some kind of link to outside the country, on another Network that was Private - and it wouldn't have to be real, it could be Virtual even.
It's a shame no such technology exists.
can't comment on how the publications are controlled, it might well be there is a clause that prevents you from submitting to an open access service.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.