
Swedish ISP Blocks Elsevier for Forcing It to Block Sci-Hub (2018) - malshe
https://boingboing.net/2018/11/03/balkanizing-the-balkanizers.html
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yorwba
Discussed 8 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370446](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370446)

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personjerry
Imagine being _against_ sharing knowledge and advancing human progress.

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johannes1234321
The counter argument is that someone has to finance creation, review and
distribution of knowledge.

Of course Elsevier doesn't pay authors of papers, doesn't pay reviewers (but
pays editors who coordinate) has to pay only little (especially compared to
days of print magazines) for distribution.

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garmaine
Which means its not a counter argument.

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ChristianBundy
Exactly, it's a talking point and I wish people would stop propagating it.

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pergadad
It's a bit complicated case and I wouldn't really blame the court. They were
asked to rule on a copyright violation, and copyright despite its bad rep has
some good reason to exist. The problem is that companies such as Elsevier have
found a way to abuse the system by gaming 3-4 things at once: public
universities, research grants, citation/research reputation, and copyright.
They are not really s monopoly and it's difficult to blame them for a specific
case of a specific journal being owned by them. It's more the overall picture
that's broken and abusive, and that's probably beyond the remit of such a
court to simply decide. The law applies for everyone, even the big abusers.

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posterboy
Ironically, the creation of monopolies over individual publications is the
express purpose of copyright.

That is, of course, antropomorphising copyright in a common figure of speech.
It would be much more logical to say that humans are subjective here, thus to
appear in subject position of the sentence. The _officers of_ the law
instrumentalize the law. "the law" is objective only in a figurative sense,
but it is a type of procedure. The courts have a good reason to lawfully
observe the intent and purpose of the legislator. The legislature had a good
reason to law copyright. That's what I think you said. But there is no good
reason for legislature to uphold the law.

Meanhile, Elsevier has failed tremendously at protecting the IP. If that
constitutes breach of contract, the contract may be suspended.

This would be circular reasoning, if the court is supposed to offer such
protection. There is hope they will continue to fail.

But there is no hope that a state who likewise paywalls public documents like
certain laws and statuts could see its conflict of interest.

\---

To be derisive: It is ironic that an ex-sovjet country citizen would fight
against centralized pooling of resources. Sovjets could not make a five year
plan work, but the free market can handle a 70-year plan? Give me a break.

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caymanjim
I'd expect Elsevier to sue them for commandeering their domain name like this.
Blocking elsevier.com is one thing (possibly actionable in itself), but taking
them to a different site with its own political agenda is a much bigger
problem. What if they were hijacking a political party's site, or a government
site, or any number of other scenarios? Even if they're up-front about the
hijacking, they're still effectively taking control of something that doesn't
belong to them, regardless of how one might feel about what Elsevier does.

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a1369209993
> they're still effectively taking control of something that doesn't belong to
> them

You mean like Elsevier is taking control of something (sci-hub.se) that
doesn't belong to them?

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kspacewalk
They are not. They are compelling an ISP to block a site (not redirect it) by
using the courts.

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mariushn
This cannot come soon enough:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S)

Are there similar initiatives in US?

