I don't know why they decided to pause uploads. Relying on Indian courts for sensible and timely judgments will only lead to grief. They do not respect precedence and judgements often depend on the judge and the people involved rather than the facts of the case.
What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.
This is tangential, but deference to precedent has become a huge problem in US and UK Commmon Law. So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position! The "legal research" battle -- like the "discovery" battle -- just adds tremendous time, expense, and complexity, and rarely or indeed almost never benefits the litigants or the court.
Strong disagree. A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making. Statute law cannot cover every case, and systems that pretend it can end up being hopelessly vague and unclear.
Common law is great. I'm much more uneasy about the alternative - i.e. legal systems where people become judges not long out of law school, with little real world experience, and proceed to make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives and livelihoods without feeling bound by precedent or being expected to explain their reasoning in any great amount of detail.
Also, word note, precedence means 'which things have priority over others?', whereas a precedent is 'something that has happened before'. A car at a green light has precedence, but the common law has precedents.
> A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making.
I've seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use. The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail, so de facto isn't "bound by precedent" -- he rules in favor of the side he's inclined to support. (Posner was briefly derided for laying this bare.)
It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 1.5TB) just about any litigant can find case law to support almost any position. You end up with a system that's much like the Civil Law, but with the added burden of "research."
I can't comment on the US, but as a legal professional in the UK, this isn't my experience at all. The vast majority of cases aren't novel - they're issues that have come before the courts many times before. Everyone knows what they're doing and which precedents are the important ones and lawyers who try to deviate from the well known and accepted position will most likely lose their case.
Every now and then, something interesting and unique comes before the courts and then you might see a bigger variety of arguments as each side tries to control the narrative. The court will decide the outcome and, if it's a sufficiently high level court, that decision becomes the new precedent and you don't need to refer to the earlier ones again because the issue is no longer novel.
> Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use
Yes. Then you figure out in what respects the current case resembles the precedent and which is more unique. There are not twenty cases where the facts and circumstances are identical to the present one because that’s not how reality works.
> Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
Literally the lawyers’ jobs to do this.
I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
Sure, but we're talking about an adversarial system where the lawyers are necessarily at-odds with each other, so they research the issue each from their own perspective. Then the one side will present the judge (in motions, etc.) with "here are ten cases that support our position, we've researched them exhaustively," and the other side goes, "no, no, those are distinguishable because X, here are ten cases that support OUR position, we've researched them extensively," -- and the judge and his clerks, so busy that it takes them two months to respond to any motion or communication, often just go with their guts and justify their decision post hoc.
> I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
lol, dude, it's a mess right now. If society cared at all about justice, and especially about access to justice, the current system would undergo absolute root-and-branch overhaul.
> I've seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use.
Sure, and there are people who can array thousands of pages of evidence that vaccines cause space reptilism and chronic nosehair. Doesn't mean it's good evidence.
The basic tradecraft of a lawyer is to figure out what the weight of the precedent on a given question is. Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
> The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
That's what clerks are for. A judge has staff! And usually a solid intuition for what the law is, built on decades of experience practicing in the field. That's why we tend to appoint our judges from experienced practitioners, and not fresh law school grads.
This is admittedly a much worse issue at the lowest levels - magistrates who deal with petty theft and the like. Those people are often fairly incompetent, sadly, but I'm not aware of any legal system that's managed to systematically solve this issue.
> It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 200TB)
The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
> Sure, and there are people who can array thousands of pages of evidence that vaccines cause space reptilism and chronic nosehair. Doesn't mean it's good evidence.
But what if the citations are valid? What if they are, at least, credible? That's how it tends to be. Flippancy doesn't correct this.
> Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
Nobody said anything about "returning to monkey" -- the claim is that systems of binding precedent tend to collapse under their own weight, and eventually come to burden courts more than they help those courts. In the end, you're no better off than you are with Civil Law that isn't bound by precedent. This isn't exactly "monkey" -- it's just a different way of administrating the law, and I think time is showing that it is a superior way of administrating non-criminal law.
> The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
All the same, I think you'd be surprised how often lower court decisions are cited when they can help a case.
> But what if the citations are valid? What if they are, at least, credible? That's how it tends to be. Flippancy doesn't correct this.
But here's the thing, even 9/11 truthers tend to make claims that, on surface level, might appear 'credible' to a layman. But only to someone who doesn't know very much about the underlying subjects and is easily overwhelmed by trivialities. Lawyers and judges do actually know a lot about the law. They know how to sift through those precedents. They know what argument is taken from a binding precedent and which is from obiter dicta, and what that means for the case at hand.
Take the Supreme Court, which gets trotted about as an example of extreme partisanship. In the 2024 term (the one just finished), a plurality of cases - 42.4% - were decided completely unanimously, 9-0. 66.7% of all cases had no more than one or two dissents. In only 16.7% of cases did the decision rest on a single vote. And in only 9.09% of cases did the judges align on 'ideological lines' - 90.91% did not follow any such split.
And that's of the cases that reach the Supreme Court, which tend to be those rare cases where there is some disagreement over the law. The vast, vast majority of court decisions are by lower courts, and usually unanimous, because most things to come up before courts have a settled answer in law and precedent. A court case is not an Internet discussion where you can strip mine Wikipedia for cites and refs for some epic dunk. That approach tends to crash very fast and very hard against reality in a court.
Most law is not contentious in the way laymen tend to imagine it to be. Experts are usually in agreement about the state of the law, because most law is reasonably settled, built upon stable and well-understood precedent.
no doubt you have seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw, but by simply omitting the context .. what jurisdiction, what burdens are placed upon the parties, what is at stake.. you make a sweeping generalization that is just false, for the sake of persuasion. Speaking authoritatively you have some responsibility to show context, otherwise this is blather IMHO
The real issue is that all systems have faults. Same with jury systems vs. trained judges.
The problem begins when law doesn't approximate justice anymore and currently it seems both separate from each other further and further. Without that law loses legitimacy. Some legal philosophy might see that differently, but it is the core of the issue.
But reforms are difficult because any lawyer will always be dependent on the status quo legal code. And not every reform would improve the situation.
While no system is perfect, and it might be a case of the grass being greener on the other side, I have some healthy respect for the US system. I am not a fan of the UK system which we have copied almost wholesale. The laws and judgments I occasionally see from there are eerily similar to what we deal with here.
As for precedent, yes, things accumulate over time, but by-and-large precedent = predictability. And that is completely missing from our system.
Out of curiosity, what is it you don't like about the UK system given that you're saying that it's "eerily similar" to the US system?
As someone who works in the UK system, I can point to two things I don't like about the US system. Firstly, the inability to recover costs in most cases. This leads to an abundance of litigation (because a party with a weak case has little to lose by trying anyway). It also produces unfair results (because the principle of justice should put the winner in the position they would have been if they hadn't been wronged, but it doesn't because they have to bear their litigation costs). Secondly, the politicisation (and in my view corruption) of the judicial system. We don't have "Conservative" or "Labour" judges here, and it's extremely weird to me that you can have "Republican" or "Democrat" judges given that a judge is supposed to just interpret the law in an unbiased way without regard to their political opinion. To me it seems that Supreme Court decisions are openly corrupt given how often the opinions are divided straight down party lines: statistically you should expect a random mix of Republican and Democrat judges adopting each side.
> Out of curiosity, what is it you don't like about the UK system given that you're saying that it's "eerily similar" to the US system?
I was comparing the Indian system to the UK and US ones. I will still take the US system, warts and all, over the Indian or UK one.
I used to be a free speech absolutist in the past. Not anymore, though I still prefer more free speech to less. The UK and India are terrible at protecting free speech. And the laws dealing with defamation/libel are bonkers based on what Simon Singh had to go through.
The second issue I have is with handling of violent crime in general and that by juveniles in particular. The Nirbhaya case is a great/famous example (and the special treatment continues to this day)[1]. Four were hanged. The fifth died in police custody. The sixth rapist-murderer was 17y6m old and was sent to a juvenile home. You have something similar in the UK. In the US, all of them would have faced severe consequences.
> I used to be a free speech absolutist in the past. Not anymore, though I still prefer more free speech to less. The UK and India are terrible at protecting free speech. And the laws dealing with defamation/libel are bonkers based on what Simon Singh had to go through.
I thought we were talking about the legal system, not the laws themselves. You can have a great legal system with terrible laws, or a terrible legal system with great laws. You can't blame the legal system for the fact that Parliament decides to pass a law which restricts free speech: it's not the role of the judiciary to decide what laws should be passed; rather, the role of a well functioning judiciary is to ensure that it applies and interprets the law (as it finds it) accurately and fairly regardless of the content of that law.
I can see the point, but repeating the same action for which you are currently being prosecuted will hardly improve your standing before the court. Quite the opposite, in fact.
What did they expect? That an Indian court will give them some kind of immunity from copyright laws? From some media reports I see, the court has already made up its mind on the issue during a previous hearing:[1]
> However, the Court stated that Elbakyan, in her first written statement, admitted that the publishers were owners of copyrighted works. It also noted that Sci-Hub were rejected by the Court when they attempted to amend the statement in 2023. Further, it accused Sci-Hub of partaking in “online piracy” and LibGen “by unauthorized means, circumventing technological measures put in place by Plaintiffs to protect copyright in their literary works.” Thus, they rejected the plea.
I have to read a lot of papers for work. Sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Often when I find one I'm interested in, they want $60 to read the one paper. If I have to read one paper a day, that's about $20,000 a year just to stay up to date with the science.
That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.
I sometimes don't even bother checking if a movie is on Netflix and instead just go "elsewhere" I know I'll find it for sure. Precisely up until not too long ago Netflix wouldn't even grant me as a Linux user FullHD resolution (despite paying for it). We're at a point where for many artists it isn't about having your work stolen or bought, but rather fading into obscurity versus someone enjoying what you created.
Can't say for certain, but it seems like I'm now getting the promised resolution. I remember once having set some DRM-relevant setting in about:config - but not for my current setup IIRC. Also am a proud Firefox user but am using Chrome for Netflix - might be part of the "solution".
I still had the same problem as a student at a major state school in the usa. Most schools don't subscribe to all the journals. I think I had IEEE and a few more, but more of the time they were paywalled.
I agree that that is ridiculous, but for many definitions of “for work”, $20k/year is well within the low end of “cost of doing business”.
I spend that much on computer hardware, and again that much on cloud services, and again that much on airfare each year, and I’m a one-person shop with very high margins.
I assume those papers are integral for your business. A $20k/year business expense is not really ridiculous. You think it is ridiculous because you can pirate it and get it for free. They are bytes and bytes are worthless or something.
It just depends on what kind of society you want to live in, one where information flows freely, or one where taxes can be levied against the entire society’s access to information, and public funds are used to protect the tax-levying middle men, and to subsidize the discovery and production of valuable information.
And obviously, for most individuals and businesses worldwide 20k USD/year is an insane expense, the fact that big moneybags that could have easily paid might get to come along for the ride is a small acceptable price to pay for making information universally accessible.
Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but to me, if there's something offered to you for a certain price, and you're not ready to pay that price, the alternative should be to either get something comparable that's cheaper (hardly possible with scientific papers) or, unfortunately, abstain from getting that thing at all.
I don't see how "what they're charging is ridiculous, and the money isn't even going to the authors, so it's okay for me to get the papers through sci-hub" is morally justified.
Independent of the above: if it's for work, your employer should pay for the paper access (unless you're self-employed, of course).
$20,000 annually to keep up on the latest science makes it prohibitively expensive for most of the world to do meaningful science. If only the rich can do science then we miss out on crucial scientific advancements. Less scientific advancements means less people get life saving medicines, less environmental disasters are uncovered and dealt with.
Plus, I was just using your own logic of replacing "paper" with anything else that I might consume in my everyday life.
I worked in research for decades - no idea where you get that $20,000 number from. Also, I cannot follow this argument of "only the rich can do science", this seems to bear any relation to reality.
These people cannot access science that is behind a paywall. The fact that they cannot is a failure. Whether its a moral failure, or an economic or a societal one, I'm not sure, but I do believe that providing free access to scientific advancements it the right thing to do.
Calling this economic rent, if anything, underplays the issue. The economics in play appear worse than what rent normally covers. The science is funded by other sources, often from the groups which want access, the scientists are not paid and many have to pay to publish. Reviewers are rarely if ever paid. Public ability to peruse science, something that is already limited by the difficulty of understanding the papers, is made far worse by the price tag. The value provided seems to mainly be some name recognition that has fed a publish or perish model that is arguably detrimental to science research at scale.
All considered, calling it economic rent appears too charitable an interpretation.
It does not matter if it should or shouldn't. Since someone else brought up insulin before, you could also argue that all medication should be free - alas it isn't.
It is totally fine to object the status quo of certain aspects of life or society. But in a democracy, the right way to go about changing them is not to just simply take what you can.
In a democracy that has been captured by massive commercial interests? Do you see any politicians ranting against the copyright system? Have a guess why?
They wield power unapologetically, Disney execs would actually kill people if they had to to get copyright terms extended, using dark libraries is a sensible response to the current state of affairs.
Why is that? Most relevant research in AI is done outside of universities and instead by companies these days. Shouldn't they have the right to sell their findings? Their research is not funded by tax money.
(Note that that's not usually where the price tag for a research paper comes from these days, it's publishers charging for their added value. You might find it debatable whether said added value warrants the amount of money they ask for, but that's orthogonal to the underlying issue.)
No one is selling their research through these papers. Researchers have to pay to publish their findings, and other researchers have to pay to access them. The only ones benefiting from this insane state of affairs are the journals, who are actively hampering the scientific process in the age of the internet.
> Shouldn't they have the right to sell their findings?
These companies make profit by selling actual products, and by patenting what findings may be profitable. I don't think they can even begin to recoup their R&D expenses by selling papers... On the other hand, open science benefits everyone. It makes public research that much more efficient and allows private actors to make the most out of it.
Just because something has a price associated with it, that does not make the pricing model inherently correct or just. The majority of research papers, at least in the U.S., are (or historically have been, I don't know the data now under the current administration) publicly funded, one way or another. Publicly-funded research should not be behind paywalls.
> Just because something has a price associated with it, that does not make the pricing model inherently correct or just.
And just because a pricing model is not correct or just does not automatically give you liberty to circumvent that pricing model. If you think that Nike shoes are overpriced and hey, there's Chinese counterfeits readily available, does not automatically make the latter legal or even morally justified.
That's correct. The liberty to circumvent the pricing model and get the papers for free is not derived from the fact the pricing model is incorrect or unjust. Rather, it's derived from the fact the papers can be obtained for free. :)
> Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life.
You eat apples, but if you replaced "apples" with "human babies", then by eating them you would be committing murder and cannibalism. It's an unpopular opinion, but this logical argument proves you are a murdering cannibalistic monster.
In the original comment, the argument is that if you replace papers with something else then you see that it stealing. But if you replace papers with something else, then you are no longer talking about scientific papers. So this is a flawed argument. The baby eating is to demonstrate how flawed.
If anything you could argue that copyright has shifted in that direction but it was certainly created originally to foster the development of art and science by protecting creators, not publishers.
Your unpopular opinion is fallacious, markets can fail and as a result grey/black markets arise. This sci-hub issue is plausible evidence of that. Moreover there are systems where markets could be entirely inappropriate. But there's no law of nature or god that tells us how to decide as a society. Indeed it is your very mention of consumerism that belies this presupposition.
Why shouldn't we abolish any digital markets then, because in theory, you could have a service similar to sci-hub for books, movies, music... And these exist and existed (and are regularly shut down by the authorities).
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals."
An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth. Nothing matters, and nothing should matter other than that. For future discoveries, we should make knowledge as accessible as possible. But when an organization forms, it competes for power and superiority. This results in discriminatory actions that cause the overall regression of collective innovation. It is sad to see this happen.
> An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth.
Maybe I'm in a certain type of bubble, but I kind of feel like that's a secondary goal (for many of them), while the first is finding and keeping a position that lets them earn enough money to survive. Some of them are lucky to be able to do both, but quite a lot of them are sacrificing the "pursuit of truth" because otherwise they wouldn't be able to feed themselves by working as a researcher.
i am not talking about people who just do job to survive there comes a point where you achieve all your needs you need something intangible like pursuit of truth/power/authority to validate your existence.
I could blame the people in the institutions, but they were once a student who wanted nothing but to achieve great things, world-changing research. But along the way they tasted power and authority. Science has inherent quality of giving power and control, realizing that every action has consequence, and in this godless world only actions you take matter. If anyone who has experienced the authority knows that it is addictive and it is hard to let go. If anyone (young budding scientists) can challenge that authority you would go to any lengths to prevent that i think this is what is happening here.
There's a long list of researchers who have done horrible things in pursuit of truth. Research ethics exist to remind us that, yes, other things matter.
Of course but that depends on one thing. Are you interested in having an honest conversation or are have you already braced yourself to shit on whatever I will say?
Depends on what you say of course. Keep in mind that someone changing their mind as they learn more is not called lying, but is the definition of science.
Your comment has been flagged and down-voted to oblivion, and I think the "fine, I'll bite" already answers your question. There is not going to be a conversation. :)
Are you aware that you're not paying the authors, but paying the journal, who usually don't pay the authors anything and even demand payment FROM the author to publish their article in the first place? This is not like buying a book, journals are leeches with morally indefensible business models.
Authors decided to pay to these journals and play by their rules in return for something, that have value for them. I respect their choice. However, I also want to have better science with free access. I can reproduce few papers, and publish my work for free, if someone will peer review them for free.
> Authors decided to pay to these journals and play by their rules in return for something, that have value for them. I respect their choice.
Have you ever spoken to anyone who works in academia? Because almost everyone will tell you that they couldn't care less if people get their articles from SciHub. Academia is much uglier than you're romanticizing it to be.
Obviously, someone must buy the paper, reproduce it, compare with original work, and then publish result for free. Same thing as for free software: someone must by a computer, write a software, then publish it on github.
Publishing it on GitHub is optional; you can publish it anywhere accessible. And unlike these journals, it doesn't cost you anything to access free software. In fact, paywalling it makes it unfree.
Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries. I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain. I'm just glad that my country is still holding out with no centralized censorship authority or mechanism to mass block websites, though that might not last for long with how things are going right now.
Central European here. We live for piracy (imagine a more positive term). We do not intend to destroy it. Which means sci-hub and libgen are going to stay. So are torrent trackers. We have our own, too.
> I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain.
I'm currently reaching it from Spain after a certificate warning. We have our own disgraceful internet access thing going on nationally at the moment, but it doesn't really depend on domains.
The freedom of the internet has peaked. I firmly believe the future of the internet is balkanisation, we’ll have “state networks” like China’s with limited intercommunication. The future will suck. Archive everything.
Same in Denmark. They even stopped DNS-blocking it by redirecting to a page telling you that you have been blocked. Instead they now DNS-block it by redirecting you to 127.0.0.1.
Depends how it's implemented - once you've found the correct IP address you still have to connect to it, and some ISPs block and otherwise mess with traffic at that stage.
In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.
(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)
The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.
Most ISPs nowadays use DPI to do these blocks which are actually redirects. And with how ssl certificates work, users will only see an error page instead of the redirected domain.
Yes that is correct. But some then look into the headers after DNS resolution. They are not blocking ip addresses returned by the dns because everything is on a cdn nowadays.
> Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?
Depends. It seems Spain is doing interception on the data going from/to IPs, as resolving sci-hub.se with my ISP resolver gives me the same IP as I get when doing it externally (186.2.163.219), but when I visit https://sci-hub.se I see a "Certificate not correct" warning, since the certificate belongs to allot.com, which seems to be the party actually implementing the block here.
# poison the DNS: you can use another unaffected DNS to bypass.
# ISP level or country level content filtering (similar to the GFW of China): you need a VPN that won't be blocked, and make sure the exit node is unaffected. (also the police won't care?)
# take down the server: finger cross that they serve the content from safe location.
Isn't the court's job to judge on compliance with the law, rather than looking at outcomes? Considering outcomes, I'd say, is the job of those writing the laws.
> However, the New Delhi court was never able to make a decision on the matter. The hearings about Sci-Hub were re-scheduled again and again over the course of months and years
Unfortunately this is a common tactic - get a ruling which favors you and then file for delays citing sometimes ridiculous excuse. There is no concept of "justice delayed is justice denied" - lot of cases stay in limbo.
>I'm aware that although the interim order to block the websites was passed, the case itself is not settled. There are currently intervenors in the case, that you can join.
The tactic will remain the same. Keep the case in limbo.
That said, people have the jugaad-mindset so, you can bet if this goes through people will find ways to circumvent at massive scale.
Indian here, living in Mumbai, can still access sci-hub (.se and all other mirrors). My local broadband provider has not been implementing any of the government bans on websites that other "mainstream" telecom providers are. Yay for small businesses!
It's also 'blocked' in the UK, to the extent that I had one more click, on the vpn button, to read the article. (Veepn free browser extension seems to work well - I've used that for a year or two).
That's not 'blocked'. That's just blocked, no quotation marks needed. Most countries' blocking attempts can be bypassed via VPNs, but that doesn't make the frameworks that let this happen any less threatening.
> Why would a justice in India serve the interests of a few rich foreign companies, while ignoring the needs of Indian students and researchers?
Because they’re used to serving the interests of large companies (domestic and international) as well as bowing to any executive comments or opinions. Indian judges rule first with their own opinions and moral views, then maybe look at the law, and then maybe consider the constitution (in that order).
As the article notes, people will just use a VPN or Tor to access the sites. The courts in India do not understand technology (like in many other countries). They just acquiesce to the demands from large companies.
With the indirect pressure through US tariffs, I wouldn’t rule out the executive finding ways to not annoy the US even more through some means.
I have a longstanding pet peeve with it (the judiciary): the entire validity and legality of the Aadhaar biometric identity program has been in limbo, pending hearing by a constitutional bench (the conclusion of “Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank”). This bench hasn’t been constituted for several years. Chief Justice after Chief Justice in the Supreme Court has ignored it and let the executive bulldoze everyone to submit, get this “voluntary” (that’s the official definition) number and link it in more and more databases.
Long story short, depending on the Indian judiciary for justice on large enough matters that affect the entire country and its future is futile. If it’s a simpler matter affecting one or two companies or a political party, the justice will be swift.
In the Aadhaar issue, the supreme court has at least clarified that aadhaar cannot be mandatory for most things. However, it upheld the requirement for linking PAN numbers to aadhaar.
PAN card is required for pretty much any major financial transaction so it does open up a major loophole. However it *is* possible to do a lot of things without Aadhaar, it just takes significantly longer and involves a lot of back and forth. The trick is to get past the frontline folks and talk to someone with real authority. Mentioning the Supreme court judgement or better still the relevant ombudsman does wonders in making the previously 'mandatory' aadhaar non mandatory.
I am not very optimistic about the situation improving anytime soon. I'm regularly shocked at how little people care about privacy are offer up detailed personal information on demand.
It is rather unfortunate, sometime back even internet archive had been blocked (it was unblocked after sometime). Going forward researchers should take a firm stance that all research will be published as open access (not the gold one). That is the only long term solution.
That being said Govt. of India did an en mass subscription for many journals for most research institutes, under the One Nation One Subscription scheme
Anna's Archive created SciDB as an alternative to SciHub when SciHub blocked uploads due to a lawsuit. It's a better source to use anyways. Do you know if it's blocked in India?
Piracy is not a problem India needs to deal with, we have bigger fish to fry. Accessible knowledge is absolutely necessary here, with even the educated masses now believing in complete hokum.
I hope this gets overturned, but then again, if you're using the internet without a privacy-first VPN like mullvad, GG.
been following the case since day 1.
Its sad that the order does not talk about any of the points raised by scihub. This appears to me a one-sided order where the judge (we do not have jury concept in india) might have been a case of "we are copyright holders, our rights trump everything" when the case is for public good and fair use.
Fair use was not explained and the plaintiffs took an argument that since alexandria is not an indian citizen or not in india, she does not fear indian laws and that somehow might have tipped the scales.
I am sure this would be appealed and i would like to join in, i already tried to contact people few years ago but life got in the way.
This is also a reminder that any serious science funding policy changes would address the elephant in the room. Science publication industry employ lobbies of course but the fact still that the requirements of hiring committees and funding decisions on publications in prestigious journals is the reason for this problem.
And requiring open access publication is not the solution. The journals demands couple of thousands at least in fees if you opt on this option which is a waste of money that could be spent better.
The scientific publications industry profit margin is the highest in the world. Higher even than the High tech companies for a reason [1].
Seems like India is shooting itself in the foot by making it more difficult to access knowledge for the benefit of overseas publishers. Countries that don't do this will be at an advantage.
India has single-payer subscription to those journals that it freely distributes to its public colleges. Only India's private research entities are the ones at a "disadvantage", if they ever really used that site.
This one is a decision by the Delhi High Court. Something that can be overridden with legislation in public interest. However, I'm not holding my breath this time.
Important to note that India has single-payer subscription for most academic journals, which is freely accessible to students in public colleges throughout the country.
For those who didn’t read the full article, because people often don’t, here is the actual / other major reason why Sci-Hub stopped:
> Why Sci-Hub stopped
> The court order was not the main reason Sci-Hub stopped releasing new papers: by 2022 most university libraries implemented two-factor authentication, and as a result, Sci-Hub could not automatically login to libraries using student / researcher username and password to download new papers. Those paywall-circumvention methods that worked well in 2011-2015 became useless in 2022.
The unseen tragedy of science paywalls is the research tools that haven't been written. The metaphorical wheel is constantly being reinvented by the general public because there is no tool that has access to all journals for doing fuzzy text search.
It becomes harder as many websites block popular VPNs themselves.
Try any US or UK government websites. Or try logging in or ordering something on BestBuy or HomeDepot. Many sites allow ordering but then cancel order next day (e.g. when processing by shop.app).
Instagram allows to open a profile either logged in or without a VPN.
in a slightly different direction: many sites also take it upon themselves to implement ip blocks. for example, us-based utility companies or healthcare companies seem to block IPs from “strategic competitor” countries (let’s say) but also from many others including supposed allies.
And it's a compliance requirement -- you are actually required to block IPs of sanctioned countries and territories.
When I argued that Google Cloud must have been blocking those already, they told me to provide some evidence (a written confirmation from GCP that they block the IPs), which is fair.
Is it "just" that, or is it Elsevier's, Wiley's, and friends' doing? As I had commented the other day on a same/similar post, One Nation One Subscription was signed with Wiley this February, maybe other publishers have done something similar.
For example in Russia it's common knowledge nowadays to the extent that babushkas discuss relative merits of various VPN services while gathering shrooms in the woods.
I don't know why they decided to pause uploads. Relying on Indian courts for sensible and timely judgments will only lead to grief. They do not respect precedence and judgements often depend on the judge and the people involved rather than the facts of the case.
What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
> They do not respect precedence
This is tangential, but deference to precedent has become a huge problem in US and UK Commmon Law. So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position! The "legal research" battle -- like the "discovery" battle -- just adds tremendous time, expense, and complexity, and rarely or indeed almost never benefits the litigants or the court.
Strong disagree. A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making. Statute law cannot cover every case, and systems that pretend it can end up being hopelessly vague and unclear.
Common law is great. I'm much more uneasy about the alternative - i.e. legal systems where people become judges not long out of law school, with little real world experience, and proceed to make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives and livelihoods without feeling bound by precedent or being expected to explain their reasoning in any great amount of detail.
Also, word note, precedence means 'which things have priority over others?', whereas a precedent is 'something that has happened before'. A car at a green light has precedence, but the common law has precedents.
> A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making.
I've seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use. The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail, so de facto isn't "bound by precedent" -- he rules in favor of the side he's inclined to support. (Posner was briefly derided for laying this bare.)
It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 1.5TB) just about any litigant can find case law to support almost any position. You end up with a system that's much like the Civil Law, but with the added burden of "research."
I can't comment on the US, but as a legal professional in the UK, this isn't my experience at all. The vast majority of cases aren't novel - they're issues that have come before the courts many times before. Everyone knows what they're doing and which precedents are the important ones and lawyers who try to deviate from the well known and accepted position will most likely lose their case.
Every now and then, something interesting and unique comes before the courts and then you might see a bigger variety of arguments as each side tries to control the narrative. The court will decide the outcome and, if it's a sufficiently high level court, that decision becomes the new precedent and you don't need to refer to the earlier ones again because the issue is no longer novel.
> Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use
Yes. Then you figure out in what respects the current case resembles the precedent and which is more unique. There are not twenty cases where the facts and circumstances are identical to the present one because that’s not how reality works.
> Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
Literally the lawyers’ jobs to do this.
I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
> Literally the lawyers’ jobs to do this.
Sure, but we're talking about an adversarial system where the lawyers are necessarily at-odds with each other, so they research the issue each from their own perspective. Then the one side will present the judge (in motions, etc.) with "here are ten cases that support our position, we've researched them exhaustively," and the other side goes, "no, no, those are distinguishable because X, here are ten cases that support OUR position, we've researched them extensively," -- and the judge and his clerks, so busy that it takes them two months to respond to any motion or communication, often just go with their guts and justify their decision post hoc.
> I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
lol, dude, it's a mess right now. If society cared at all about justice, and especially about access to justice, the current system would undergo absolute root-and-branch overhaul.
> they research the issue each from their own perspective
They research the other side’s citations, too.
> I've seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use.
Sure, and there are people who can array thousands of pages of evidence that vaccines cause space reptilism and chronic nosehair. Doesn't mean it's good evidence.
The basic tradecraft of a lawyer is to figure out what the weight of the precedent on a given question is. Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
> The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
That's what clerks are for. A judge has staff! And usually a solid intuition for what the law is, built on decades of experience practicing in the field. That's why we tend to appoint our judges from experienced practitioners, and not fresh law school grads.
This is admittedly a much worse issue at the lowest levels - magistrates who deal with petty theft and the like. Those people are often fairly incompetent, sadly, but I'm not aware of any legal system that's managed to systematically solve this issue.
> It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 200TB)
The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
> Sure, and there are people who can array thousands of pages of evidence that vaccines cause space reptilism and chronic nosehair. Doesn't mean it's good evidence.
But what if the citations are valid? What if they are, at least, credible? That's how it tends to be. Flippancy doesn't correct this.
> Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
Nobody said anything about "returning to monkey" -- the claim is that systems of binding precedent tend to collapse under their own weight, and eventually come to burden courts more than they help those courts. In the end, you're no better off than you are with Civil Law that isn't bound by precedent. This isn't exactly "monkey" -- it's just a different way of administrating the law, and I think time is showing that it is a superior way of administrating non-criminal law.
> The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
All the same, I think you'd be surprised how often lower court decisions are cited when they can help a case.
> But what if the citations are valid? What if they are, at least, credible? That's how it tends to be. Flippancy doesn't correct this.
But here's the thing, even 9/11 truthers tend to make claims that, on surface level, might appear 'credible' to a layman. But only to someone who doesn't know very much about the underlying subjects and is easily overwhelmed by trivialities. Lawyers and judges do actually know a lot about the law. They know how to sift through those precedents. They know what argument is taken from a binding precedent and which is from obiter dicta, and what that means for the case at hand.
Take the Supreme Court, which gets trotted about as an example of extreme partisanship. In the 2024 term (the one just finished), a plurality of cases - 42.4% - were decided completely unanimously, 9-0. 66.7% of all cases had no more than one or two dissents. In only 16.7% of cases did the decision rest on a single vote. And in only 9.09% of cases did the judges align on 'ideological lines' - 90.91% did not follow any such split.
And that's of the cases that reach the Supreme Court, which tend to be those rare cases where there is some disagreement over the law. The vast, vast majority of court decisions are by lower courts, and usually unanimous, because most things to come up before courts have a settled answer in law and precedent. A court case is not an Internet discussion where you can strip mine Wikipedia for cites and refs for some epic dunk. That approach tends to crash very fast and very hard against reality in a court.
Most law is not contentious in the way laymen tend to imagine it to be. Experts are usually in agreement about the state of the law, because most law is reasonably settled, built upon stable and well-understood precedent.
no doubt you have seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw, but by simply omitting the context .. what jurisdiction, what burdens are placed upon the parties, what is at stake.. you make a sweeping generalization that is just false, for the sake of persuasion. Speaking authoritatively you have some responsibility to show context, otherwise this is blather IMHO
The real issue is that all systems have faults. Same with jury systems vs. trained judges.
The problem begins when law doesn't approximate justice anymore and currently it seems both separate from each other further and further. Without that law loses legitimacy. Some legal philosophy might see that differently, but it is the core of the issue.
But reforms are difficult because any lawyer will always be dependent on the status quo legal code. And not every reform would improve the situation.
While no system is perfect, and it might be a case of the grass being greener on the other side, I have some healthy respect for the US system. I am not a fan of the UK system which we have copied almost wholesale. The laws and judgments I occasionally see from there are eerily similar to what we deal with here.
As for precedent, yes, things accumulate over time, but by-and-large precedent = predictability. And that is completely missing from our system.
Out of curiosity, what is it you don't like about the UK system given that you're saying that it's "eerily similar" to the US system?
As someone who works in the UK system, I can point to two things I don't like about the US system. Firstly, the inability to recover costs in most cases. This leads to an abundance of litigation (because a party with a weak case has little to lose by trying anyway). It also produces unfair results (because the principle of justice should put the winner in the position they would have been if they hadn't been wronged, but it doesn't because they have to bear their litigation costs). Secondly, the politicisation (and in my view corruption) of the judicial system. We don't have "Conservative" or "Labour" judges here, and it's extremely weird to me that you can have "Republican" or "Democrat" judges given that a judge is supposed to just interpret the law in an unbiased way without regard to their political opinion. To me it seems that Supreme Court decisions are openly corrupt given how often the opinions are divided straight down party lines: statistically you should expect a random mix of Republican and Democrat judges adopting each side.
> Out of curiosity, what is it you don't like about the UK system given that you're saying that it's "eerily similar" to the US system?
I was comparing the Indian system to the UK and US ones. I will still take the US system, warts and all, over the Indian or UK one.
I used to be a free speech absolutist in the past. Not anymore, though I still prefer more free speech to less. The UK and India are terrible at protecting free speech. And the laws dealing with defamation/libel are bonkers based on what Simon Singh had to go through.
The second issue I have is with handling of violent crime in general and that by juveniles in particular. The Nirbhaya case is a great/famous example (and the special treatment continues to this day)[1]. Four were hanged. The fifth died in police custody. The sixth rapist-murderer was 17y6m old and was sent to a juvenile home. You have something similar in the UK. In the US, all of them would have faced severe consequences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape_and_murde...
> I used to be a free speech absolutist in the past. Not anymore, though I still prefer more free speech to less. The UK and India are terrible at protecting free speech. And the laws dealing with defamation/libel are bonkers based on what Simon Singh had to go through.
I thought we were talking about the legal system, not the laws themselves. You can have a great legal system with terrible laws, or a terrible legal system with great laws. You can't blame the legal system for the fact that Parliament decides to pass a law which restricts free speech: it's not the role of the judiciary to decide what laws should be passed; rather, the role of a well functioning judiciary is to ensure that it applies and interprets the law (as it finds it) accurately and fairly regardless of the content of that law.
Precedence should be one consideration, like context, and maybe not too much interpretation or opinion.
> So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position!
that is FUD, and irresponsible to repeat
The key factor in a high profile case is to hire the right (expensive) lawyer.
There’s one particularly notorious character whose rate card has been published online. He charges INR 1.5 million per appearance in court.
The reality is of course that then the appropriate judges will hear the case.
Rarely, if ever, will a judge recuse themselves. Strangely, this happened last week.
https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/nclat-judge-chennai-recu...
This sounds a lot like current Supreme Court of the USA as well. Judges ignoring stare decisis and just making it up as they go along.
I can see the point, but repeating the same action for which you are currently being prosecuted will hardly improve your standing before the court. Quite the opposite, in fact.
What did they expect? That an Indian court will give them some kind of immunity from copyright laws? From some media reports I see, the court has already made up its mind on the issue during a previous hearing:[1]
> However, the Court stated that Elbakyan, in her first written statement, admitted that the publishers were owners of copyrighted works. It also noted that Sci-Hub were rejected by the Court when they attempted to amend the statement in 2023. Further, it accused Sci-Hub of partaking in “online piracy” and LibGen “by unauthorized means, circumventing technological measures put in place by Plaintiffs to protect copyright in their literary works.” Thus, they rejected the plea.
[1] https://www.medianama.com/2024/05/223-delhi-hc-lawsuit-sci-h...
Well said. Indian judiciary is beyond ridiculous
I have to read a lot of papers for work. Sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Often when I find one I'm interested in, they want $60 to read the one paper. If I have to read one paper a day, that's about $20,000 a year just to stay up to date with the science.
That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.
Assuming you are in the States, it would be cheaper to enroll in one course a year and use the universities library system to get the papers you need.
What always bothered me about those though is their terribly clunky UI, dozens of redirects, weird auth flows, and more.
Piracy is a service problem. I also have access through university but never use it due to jank.
I sometimes don't even bother checking if a movie is on Netflix and instead just go "elsewhere" I know I'll find it for sure. Precisely up until not too long ago Netflix wouldn't even grant me as a Linux user FullHD resolution (despite paying for it). We're at a point where for many artists it isn't about having your work stolen or bought, but rather fading into obscurity versus someone enjoying what you created.
> until not too long ago
what changed? I'm tired of having to use the ps5 as a media player :/
Can't say for certain, but it seems like I'm now getting the promised resolution. I remember once having set some DRM-relevant setting in about:config - but not for my current setup IIRC. Also am a proud Firefox user but am using Chrome for Netflix - might be part of the "solution".
That's not the only issue here. Publicly funded papers should be freely available.
I still had the same problem as a student at a major state school in the usa. Most schools don't subscribe to all the journals. I think I had IEEE and a few more, but more of the time they were paywalled.
I agree that that is ridiculous, but for many definitions of “for work”, $20k/year is well within the low end of “cost of doing business”.
I spend that much on computer hardware, and again that much on cloud services, and again that much on airfare each year, and I’m a one-person shop with very high margins.
Services are also a supply chain.
I assume those papers are integral for your business. A $20k/year business expense is not really ridiculous. You think it is ridiculous because you can pirate it and get it for free. They are bytes and bytes are worthless or something.
It just depends on what kind of society you want to live in, one where information flows freely, or one where taxes can be levied against the entire society’s access to information, and public funds are used to protect the tax-levying middle men, and to subsidize the discovery and production of valuable information.
And obviously, for most individuals and businesses worldwide 20k USD/year is an insane expense, the fact that big moneybags that could have easily paid might get to come along for the ride is a small acceptable price to pay for making information universally accessible.
Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but to me, if there's something offered to you for a certain price, and you're not ready to pay that price, the alternative should be to either get something comparable that's cheaper (hardly possible with scientific papers) or, unfortunately, abstain from getting that thing at all.
I don't see how "what they're charging is ridiculous, and the money isn't even going to the authors, so it's okay for me to get the papers through sci-hub" is morally justified.
Independent of the above: if it's for work, your employer should pay for the paper access (unless you're self-employed, of course).
That's what I tell diabetic patients struggling to afford insulin. "Hey that's the price, that's just how it is, if you don't like it, don't buy it"
Please, let's stay real. How is comparing a vital drug even remotely comparable to scientific papers?
$20,000 annually to keep up on the latest science makes it prohibitively expensive for most of the world to do meaningful science. If only the rich can do science then we miss out on crucial scientific advancements. Less scientific advancements means less people get life saving medicines, less environmental disasters are uncovered and dealt with.
Plus, I was just using your own logic of replacing "paper" with anything else that I might consume in my everyday life.
I worked in research for decades - no idea where you get that $20,000 number from. Also, I cannot follow this argument of "only the rich can do science", this seems to bear any relation to reality.
The math for the $20,000 is in my first post. $60 a paper times 365 days a year is $21,900 and I rounded down.
I don't have an example of a $60 paper (I don't keep a list) but below is a $42 paper and a $35 paper that I came across very recently.
https://library.seg.org/doi/epub/10.1190/geo2023-0525.1
https://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/52034eb04b657aea,442...
This is prohibitively expensive for the majority of the world.
Remember that the global average annual salary is around $18,000 (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040).
These people cannot access science that is behind a paywall. The fact that they cannot is a failure. Whether its a moral failure, or an economic or a societal one, I'm not sure, but I do believe that providing free access to scientific advancements it the right thing to do.
You’re right, information is completely worthless, let’s turn off the state-backed monopoly on it!
[dead]
Science brings humanity forward, your Netflix subscription does not. Simple as that. The former should not be the subject of economic rent.
Calling this economic rent, if anything, underplays the issue. The economics in play appear worse than what rent normally covers. The science is funded by other sources, often from the groups which want access, the scientists are not paid and many have to pay to publish. Reviewers are rarely if ever paid. Public ability to peruse science, something that is already limited by the difficulty of understanding the papers, is made far worse by the price tag. The value provided seems to mainly be some name recognition that has fed a publish or perish model that is arguably detrimental to science research at scale.
All considered, calling it economic rent appears too charitable an interpretation.
It does not matter if it should or shouldn't. Since someone else brought up insulin before, you could also argue that all medication should be free - alas it isn't.
It is totally fine to object the status quo of certain aspects of life or society. But in a democracy, the right way to go about changing them is not to just simply take what you can.
In a democracy that has been captured by massive commercial interests? Do you see any politicians ranting against the copyright system? Have a guess why?
They wield power unapologetically, Disney execs would actually kill people if they had to to get copyright terms extended, using dark libraries is a sensible response to the current state of affairs.
Profiteering is bad, even more so when it's about science. That's my moral justification. Using Sci-Hub is illegal, but far from immoral in my book.
Why is that? Most relevant research in AI is done outside of universities and instead by companies these days. Shouldn't they have the right to sell their findings? Their research is not funded by tax money.
(Note that that's not usually where the price tag for a research paper comes from these days, it's publishers charging for their added value. You might find it debatable whether said added value warrants the amount of money they ask for, but that's orthogonal to the underlying issue.)
No one is selling their research through these papers. Researchers have to pay to publish their findings, and other researchers have to pay to access them. The only ones benefiting from this insane state of affairs are the journals, who are actively hampering the scientific process in the age of the internet.
> Shouldn't they have the right to sell their findings?
These companies make profit by selling actual products, and by patenting what findings may be profitable. I don't think they can even begin to recoup their R&D expenses by selling papers... On the other hand, open science benefits everyone. It makes public research that much more efficient and allows private actors to make the most out of it.
Just because something has a price associated with it, that does not make the pricing model inherently correct or just. The majority of research papers, at least in the U.S., are (or historically have been, I don't know the data now under the current administration) publicly funded, one way or another. Publicly-funded research should not be behind paywalls.
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/funding-sources-of-acad...
> Just because something has a price associated with it, that does not make the pricing model inherently correct or just.
And just because a pricing model is not correct or just does not automatically give you liberty to circumvent that pricing model. If you think that Nike shoes are overpriced and hey, there's Chinese counterfeits readily available, does not automatically make the latter legal or even morally justified.
That's correct. The liberty to circumvent the pricing model and get the papers for free is not derived from the fact the pricing model is incorrect or unjust. Rather, it's derived from the fact the papers can be obtained for free. :)
> Replace "paper" with anything else you consume in your everyday life.
You eat apples, but if you replaced "apples" with "human babies", then by eating them you would be committing murder and cannibalism. It's an unpopular opinion, but this logical argument proves you are a murdering cannibalistic monster.
Oh my god. I gotta stop eating apples.
Er, what?
In the original comment, the argument is that if you replace papers with something else then you see that it stealing. But if you replace papers with something else, then you are no longer talking about scientific papers. So this is a flawed argument. The baby eating is to demonstrate how flawed.
Copyright exists to protect publishers, not the people actually doing the work.
Copyright was created for the specific purpose of censorship.
If anything you could argue that copyright has shifted in that direction but it was certainly created originally to foster the development of art and science by protecting creators, not publishers.
Your unpopular opinion is fallacious, markets can fail and as a result grey/black markets arise. This sci-hub issue is plausible evidence of that. Moreover there are systems where markets could be entirely inappropriate. But there's no law of nature or god that tells us how to decide as a society. Indeed it is your very mention of consumerism that belies this presupposition.
Why shouldn't we abolish any digital markets then, because in theory, you could have a service similar to sci-hub for books, movies, music... And these exist and existed (and are regularly shut down by the authorities).
"We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn't run by profiteering gluttons, and you call us criminals. We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals."
An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth. Nothing matters, and nothing should matter other than that. For future discoveries, we should make knowledge as accessible as possible. But when an organization forms, it competes for power and superiority. This results in discriminatory actions that cause the overall regression of collective innovation. It is sad to see this happen.
> An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth.
Maybe I'm in a certain type of bubble, but I kind of feel like that's a secondary goal (for many of them), while the first is finding and keeping a position that lets them earn enough money to survive. Some of them are lucky to be able to do both, but quite a lot of them are sacrificing the "pursuit of truth" because otherwise they wouldn't be able to feed themselves by working as a researcher.
i am not talking about people who just do job to survive there comes a point where you achieve all your needs you need something intangible like pursuit of truth/power/authority to validate your existence. I could blame the people in the institutions, but they were once a student who wanted nothing but to achieve great things, world-changing research. But along the way they tasted power and authority. Science has inherent quality of giving power and control, realizing that every action has consequence, and in this godless world only actions you take matter. If anyone who has experienced the authority knows that it is addictive and it is hard to let go. If anyone (young budding scientists) can challenge that authority you would go to any lengths to prevent that i think this is what is happening here.
Yes, but giving people a dream is a good way to let them look for low salary jobs.
No, no, no, no, no!
There's a long list of researchers who have done horrible things in pursuit of truth. Research ethics exist to remind us that, yes, other things matter.
[flagged]
Fine, I'll bite. How did scientists (as a whole) lie to people during covid?
Of course but that depends on one thing. Are you interested in having an honest conversation or are have you already braced yourself to shit on whatever I will say?
Depends on what you say of course. Keep in mind that someone changing their mind as they learn more is not called lying, but is the definition of science.
No I honestly don’t ant to know what you think and the evidence for such a claim.
So your were just trolling. Got it.
whoops autocomplete / fat fingers fail.
I *honestly want to know — not trolling
Your comment has been flagged and down-voted to oblivion, and I think the "fine, I'll bite" already answers your question. There is not going to be a conversation. :)
Scientists can reproduce the findings and publish their own paper, instead of pirating someone else work.
> pirating someone else work.
Are you aware that you're not paying the authors, but paying the journal, who usually don't pay the authors anything and even demand payment FROM the author to publish their article in the first place? This is not like buying a book, journals are leeches with morally indefensible business models.
Authors decided to pay to these journals and play by their rules in return for something, that have value for them. I respect their choice. However, I also want to have better science with free access. I can reproduce few papers, and publish my work for free, if someone will peer review them for free.
> Authors decided to pay to these journals and play by their rules in return for something, that have value for them. I respect their choice.
Have you ever spoken to anyone who works in academia? Because almost everyone will tell you that they couldn't care less if people get their articles from SciHub. Academia is much uglier than you're romanticizing it to be.
Yep, I spoke. Yeo, they don't care, or have no clue. Nope, I respect their choice. IMHO, SciHub should be opt-in instead of opt-out to be legal.
How do you reproduce a paper without having read it?
Obviously, someone must buy the paper, reproduce it, compare with original work, and then publish result for free. Same thing as for free software: someone must by a computer, write a software, then publish it on github.
Publishing it on GitHub is optional; you can publish it anywhere accessible. And unlike these journals, it doesn't cost you anything to access free software. In fact, paywalling it makes it unfree.
I think you don't know what you're talking about.
What a shameful government!
clicks the link
blocked
Oh right, France government is shameful too.
Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries. I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain. I'm just glad that my country is still holding out with no centralized censorship authority or mechanism to mass block websites, though that might not last for long with how things are going right now.
> Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries.
At this point, it is a global phenomenon (and there's been discussions at the UN General Assembly on carving up interwebs for "security"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_sovereignty
Central European here. We live for piracy (imagine a more positive term). We do not intend to destroy it. Which means sci-hub and libgen are going to stay. So are torrent trackers. We have our own, too.
If piracy was somehow blocked in Central European countries, there would be actual riots.
My thoughts as well!
> I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain.
I'm currently reaching it from Spain after a certificate warning. We have our own disgraceful internet access thing going on nationally at the moment, but it doesn't really depend on domains.
Works fine for me from Spain. Maybe due to IPv6...
The freedom of the internet has peaked. I firmly believe the future of the internet is balkanisation, we’ll have “state networks” like China’s with limited intercommunication. The future will suck. Archive everything.
Same in Germany, unfortunately. Was on HN a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003033
Fortunately, in Poland it still works.
Sadly, most of the Europe is in favour of various kind of censorship and surveillance, vide https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1n22e8s/stances_on...
When scihub main ip/domain was banned by commercial ISPs in France, I could still access it through Renater, which is extremely ironic.
I wonder if a french researcher (or a French student in a university/engineering school) could check if it's still the case.
Same in Denmark. They even stopped DNS-blocking it by redirecting to a page telling you that you have been blocked. Instead they now DNS-block it by redirecting you to 127.0.0.1.
> France government is shameful too
If you had any doubt…
Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?
Depends how it's implemented - once you've found the correct IP address you still have to connect to it, and some ISPs block and otherwise mess with traffic at that stage.
In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.
(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)
The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.
Most ISPs nowadays use DPI to do these blocks which are actually redirects. And with how ssl certificates work, users will only see an error page instead of the redirected domain.
If you're on Android you can use Intra from google https://getintra.org/intl/en-GB/#!/
Or if you're on Windows you can use GoodbyeDPI https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI
Both will split up your dns requests into chunks so the ISPs filter won't catch it.
If you have DNS-over-HTTPS enabled, then ISP won't be able to interfere with DNS. Right?
Yes that is correct. But some then look into the headers after DNS resolution. They are not blocking ip addresses returned by the dns because everything is on a cdn nowadays.
These tools obfuscates your headers as well.
> Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?
Depends. It seems Spain is doing interception on the data going from/to IPs, as resolving sci-hub.se with my ISP resolver gives me the same IP as I get when doing it externally (186.2.163.219), but when I visit https://sci-hub.se I see a "Certificate not correct" warning, since the certificate belongs to allot.com, which seems to be the party actually implementing the block here.
You can keep refreshing the page and eventually it will work.
Depends on how they implement the censorship:
# poison the DNS: you can use another unaffected DNS to bypass.
# ISP level or country level content filtering (similar to the GFW of China): you need a VPN that won't be blocked, and make sure the exit node is unaffected. (also the police won't care?)
# take down the server: finger cross that they serve the content from safe location.
Works for me in France using the 1.1.1.1 DNS server, which I use on all my devices.
same in Italy (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
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Also United Kingdom.
Then we meet the question again: how to protect children/copyright owner without censorship?
or how to censor content while keeping freedom of speech?
It's only blocked on certain ISPs in the UK. Mine (Zen) is not blocked.
Ironically, hosted on a page that me in "modern" Spain cannot read as Sci-Hub been blocked here with a lot of ISPs for a long time :)
Knowledge should not be restricted in anyway, we should have direct access to these and also LLMs as well.
Currently, many LLM services only provide stuff from the study abstract.
India has nothing to gain and everything to lose with this block.
I wish the courts would care about that. Especially the Delhi High Court, which is one of the most politically driven among the bunch.
Isn't the court's job to judge on compliance with the law, rather than looking at outcomes? Considering outcomes, I'd say, is the job of those writing the laws.
India already has single-payer subscription freely provided to students and researchers in most of its colleges, they'll be fine.
But yes, not a good look to bend down to foreign publishing companies. They should have told them to f off.
It is not fine. Research is mostly done by Universities that get money from the government.
Then the universities have to pay a 3rd party both to publish said research and to get access to research done by others in the same field.
Even though it is free for researches/students it costs universities (and therefore indirectly taxpayers) multiple millions $/year.
Fuck that. Also, after the scandals of predatory practices (e.g. https://top2percentscientists.com/peer-review-payment-scanda...) is there really a benefit in using the services these society leeches provide?
> However, the New Delhi court was never able to make a decision on the matter. The hearings about Sci-Hub were re-scheduled again and again over the course of months and years
Unfortunately this is a common tactic - get a ruling which favors you and then file for delays citing sometimes ridiculous excuse. There is no concept of "justice delayed is justice denied" - lot of cases stay in limbo.
>I'm aware that although the interim order to block the websites was passed, the case itself is not settled. There are currently intervenors in the case, that you can join.
The tactic will remain the same. Keep the case in limbo.
That said, people have the jugaad-mindset so, you can bet if this goes through people will find ways to circumvent at massive scale.
Indian here, living in Mumbai, can still access sci-hub (.se and all other mirrors). My local broadband provider has not been implementing any of the government bans on websites that other "mainstream" telecom providers are. Yay for small businesses!
It's also 'blocked' in the UK, to the extent that I had one more click, on the vpn button, to read the article. (Veepn free browser extension seems to work well - I've used that for a year or two).
That's not 'blocked'. That's just blocked, no quotation marks needed. Most countries' blocking attempts can be bypassed via VPNs, but that doesn't make the frameworks that let this happen any less threatening.
I'd strongly advise against free VPNs; they are a massive security and privacy risk.
Here's recent news about another free vpn that took screengrabs of users' sessions: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/a-...
As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, the product is you.
> Why would a justice in India serve the interests of a few rich foreign companies, while ignoring the needs of Indian students and researchers?
Because they’re used to serving the interests of large companies (domestic and international) as well as bowing to any executive comments or opinions. Indian judges rule first with their own opinions and moral views, then maybe look at the law, and then maybe consider the constitution (in that order).
As the article notes, people will just use a VPN or Tor to access the sites. The courts in India do not understand technology (like in many other countries). They just acquiesce to the demands from large companies.
With the indirect pressure through US tariffs, I wouldn’t rule out the executive finding ways to not annoy the US even more through some means.
I have a longstanding pet peeve with it (the judiciary): the entire validity and legality of the Aadhaar biometric identity program has been in limbo, pending hearing by a constitutional bench (the conclusion of “Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank”). This bench hasn’t been constituted for several years. Chief Justice after Chief Justice in the Supreme Court has ignored it and let the executive bulldoze everyone to submit, get this “voluntary” (that’s the official definition) number and link it in more and more databases.
Long story short, depending on the Indian judiciary for justice on large enough matters that affect the entire country and its future is futile. If it’s a simpler matter affecting one or two companies or a political party, the justice will be swift.
In the Aadhaar issue, the supreme court has at least clarified that aadhaar cannot be mandatory for most things. However, it upheld the requirement for linking PAN numbers to aadhaar.
PAN card is required for pretty much any major financial transaction so it does open up a major loophole. However it *is* possible to do a lot of things without Aadhaar, it just takes significantly longer and involves a lot of back and forth. The trick is to get past the frontline folks and talk to someone with real authority. Mentioning the Supreme court judgement or better still the relevant ombudsman does wonders in making the previously 'mandatory' aadhaar non mandatory.
I am not very optimistic about the situation improving anytime soon. I'm regularly shocked at how little people care about privacy are offer up detailed personal information on demand.
It is rather unfortunate, sometime back even internet archive had been blocked (it was unblocked after sometime). Going forward researchers should take a firm stance that all research will be published as open access (not the gold one). That is the only long term solution.
That being said Govt. of India did an en mass subscription for many journals for most research institutes, under the One Nation One Subscription scheme
https://onos.gov.in/
Anna's Archive created SciDB as an alternative to SciHub when SciHub blocked uploads due to a lawsuit. It's a better source to use anyways. Do you know if it's blocked in India?
Piracy is not a problem India needs to deal with, we have bigger fish to fry. Accessible knowledge is absolutely necessary here, with even the educated masses now believing in complete hokum.
I hope this gets overturned, but then again, if you're using the internet without a privacy-first VPN like mullvad, GG.
been following the case since day 1. Its sad that the order does not talk about any of the points raised by scihub. This appears to me a one-sided order where the judge (we do not have jury concept in india) might have been a case of "we are copyright holders, our rights trump everything" when the case is for public good and fair use.
Fair use was not explained and the plaintiffs took an argument that since alexandria is not an indian citizen or not in india, she does not fear indian laws and that somehow might have tipped the scales.
I am sure this would be appealed and i would like to join in, i already tried to contact people few years ago but life got in the way.
btw, i am a licensed indian lawyer
Should this sort of submission be using an .onion link, considering how many readers it is blocked for? Assuming (& iirc) sci-hub has an official one
This is also a reminder that any serious science funding policy changes would address the elephant in the room. Science publication industry employ lobbies of course but the fact still that the requirements of hiring committees and funding decisions on publications in prestigious journals is the reason for this problem.
And requiring open access publication is not the solution. The journals demands couple of thousands at least in fees if you opt on this option which is a waste of money that could be spent better.
The scientific publications industry profit margin is the highest in the world. Higher even than the High tech companies for a reason [1].
[1] https://theconversation.com/academic-publishing-is-a-multibi...
This site is blocked at my workplace as well. A message from FortiGate says: "Category: Illegal or Unethical"
Obviously Fortinet is not going to let pirate sites through its firewall
Seems like India is shooting itself in the foot by making it more difficult to access knowledge for the benefit of overseas publishers. Countries that don't do this will be at an advantage.
India has single-payer subscription to those journals that it freely distributes to its public colleges. Only India's private research entities are the ones at a "disadvantage", if they ever really used that site.
Seems like the Indian High Court has decided to kneel to western land lords.
This one is a decision by the Delhi High Court. Something that can be overridden with legislation in public interest. However, I'm not holding my breath this time.
Important to note that India has single-payer subscription for most academic journals, which is freely accessible to students in public colleges throughout the country.
For those who didn’t read the full article, because people often don’t, here is the actual / other major reason why Sci-Hub stopped:
> Why Sci-Hub stopped
> The court order was not the main reason Sci-Hub stopped releasing new papers: by 2022 most university libraries implemented two-factor authentication, and as a result, Sci-Hub could not automatically login to libraries using student / researcher username and password to download new papers. Those paywall-circumvention methods that worked well in 2011-2015 became useless in 2022.
But has sci-hub really been working as of late? Last time I checked I couldn't find anything.
Why would you make life harder for your own citizens by doing this?
The unseen tragedy of science paywalls is the research tools that haven't been written. The metaphorical wheel is constantly being reinvented by the general public because there is no tool that has access to all journals for doing fuzzy text search.
What's wrong with you India?
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It becomes harder as many websites block popular VPNs themselves.
Try any US or UK government websites. Or try logging in or ordering something on BestBuy or HomeDepot. Many sites allow ordering but then cancel order next day (e.g. when processing by shop.app).
Instagram allows to open a profile either logged in or without a VPN.
in a slightly different direction: many sites also take it upon themselves to implement ip blocks. for example, us-based utility companies or healthcare companies seem to block IPs from “strategic competitor” countries (let’s say) but also from many others including supposed allies.
And it's a compliance requirement -- you are actually required to block IPs of sanctioned countries and territories.
When I argued that Google Cloud must have been blocking those already, they told me to provide some evidence (a written confirmation from GCP that they block the IPs), which is fair.
How are websites blocked in India? Do you need a VPN or can you just use a different DNS server?
It depends on the service provider.
Some used to mess with DNS. Others used to use packet inspection.
Personally I’ve not experienced any blocking, probably due to DoH.
Is it "just" that, or is it Elsevier's, Wiley's, and friends' doing? As I had commented the other day on a same/similar post, One Nation One Subscription was signed with Wiley this February, maybe other publishers have done something similar.
Only a few people will know how to use VPN, not everyone.
Oppression helps disseminate knowledge.
For example in Russia it's common knowledge nowadays to the extent that babushkas discuss relative merits of various VPN services while gathering shrooms in the woods.
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