
Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains - beefman
https://torrentfreak.com/publisher-gets-carte-blanche-to-seize-new-sci-hub-domains-180410/
======
cdcox
I'm actually surprised this whole suit is being pursued by a professional
society. Closed publications seem to be out of line with the interest of their
members. Unless the society makes substantial money from their publications,
which is unlikely[0], it's hard to see what the motivation of this
organization would be and why the members of the society haven't loudly
complained against it. I'd really expect a suit from this to come from
Elseiver or NPG.

[0] From talking to a few representives of sceintific societies it sounds like
they usually produce thier journals at or around cost.

~~~
ocschwar
> I'm actually surprised this whole suit is being pursued by a professional
> society. Closed publications seem to be out of line with the interest of
> their members.

Not exactly.

I fully recognize that Elsevier and Springer Verlag have behaved so
obnoxiously that they make everything I'm about to say sound ridiculous, but
nevertheless, here goes.

"If you're not the customer, you're the product."

When I get the latest issue of (say) IEEE Transactions On What I Do For a
Living, I want to know that the editors did their best to solicit and round up
the best new work on advancing the state of the art in my specialty, and that
the manuscripts they received check out and are worthy.

That takes money, because the editors have bills to pay and can't really do
this on a volunteer basis. Even though the peer reviewers are volunteers,
getting them to volunteer is itself work. And the work starts by filtering the
slush out so you're not asking the reviewers to look at stuff that's utter
crap.

Advertiser support is not appropriate here. "This issue of IEEE Power And
Energy is brought to you by Xformer Corp. (So don't even think about
discussing in these pages how our transformers blow up more often than should
happen in polite society.""

Author support is even less appropriate, with all due respect to the PLOS line
of journals.

And yes, the professional societies try to price subscriptions and downloads
so their budget is at break-even, which is why they have an interest in
getting subscriptions and payments from as many people as possible, i.e. by
not making the PDFs available for free. If everyone in EECS joined IEEE,
membership fees would go down, and they could add Transactions access to the
standard membership package.

I do still think it's counterproductive to crack down on Sci-Hub. Ultimately,
what we need is a micropayments system that makes paying for downloads too
seamlessly easy to be worth dodging. If Venmoing for PDFs took less time to
set up and use than going to Sci-Hub, this would be moot.

~~~
dnomad
Yeah, everything you said is ridiculous.

Journals are _very much_ a profit center for the publishers. Scientific
journal publishing is a wildly profitable business[1][2][3] and it is not all
the clear that these profits are commensurate with journal quality. They are
almost certainly monopoly rents. And the idea that membership fees pay for the
journals is also silly. It's well known that it's institutions who pay the
outrageous subscription fees for the journal that are actually powering this
racket.

The interesting point here is that Sci-Hub isn't _really_ a threat to the
publishers. Like with most piracy it's not clear that the people using Sci-Hub
would purchase the papers if Sci-Hub weren't available. And no matter what the
publishers can always count on those fat institutional subscription fees. And
that's what this is really about. The ultimate danger of Sci-Hub is that it
undermines the very idea of a journal. Individual scientific papers become the
unit of trade and people will take those papers on an a la carte basis.
SciHub, if it were left alone, would unbundle science publishing and you'd see
a drastic fall in profits.

This is all about money and protecting a wildly profitable business model. The
idea that this is about supporting editors is ridiculous.

[1] [https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-
profits-...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-
swell-more-ps900-million)

[2]
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-
business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science)

[3] [https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-
elsevier...](https://medium.com/@jasonschmitt/can-t-disrupt-this-elsevier-and-
the-25-2-billion-dollar-a-year-academic-publishing-business-aa3b9618d40a)

~~~
ocschwar
> Journals are very much a profit center for the publishers.

For Elsevier, Springer, WIley, yes.

For IEEE? For ACS? For AIP? Not so much.

> nd it is not all the clear that these profits are commensurate with journal
> quality

THey're not. I shouldn't have to pay $35 dollars for an Elsevier PDF when
Elsevier didn't even have the decency to spend some of that money on copy
editing to help authors who don't speak good English.

But I should pay a price. Because the alternative is for someone else to pay,
someone who does not have my interests at heart.

~~~
gliboc
Since when do you need to pay just to download a PDF ? Just remember there's
peer to peer, and that the web is not a big black box where you can only deal
with giant companies and their websites - there's freedom in it too.

Also: I think your attitude is quite symptomatic of a certain laziness of the
research community, which has helped these counterproductive monopolies to
rise and strive. Get angry, for once, because this is getting ridiculous.

------
JumpCrisscross
You can contact the plaintiff’s Board of Directors by calling (800) 227-5558
or sending an e-mail to secretary@acs.org [1].

Here is a list of their Board of Directors:
[https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/governance/board/bo...](https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/governance/board/board-
of-directors-images.html) . See a person or organisation you know? Let them
know your thoughts about this.

[1]
[https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/governance/board/co...](https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/about/governance/board/contact.html)

------
JumpCrisscross
Wikipedia’s Sci-Hub entry guides one to live addresses [1]. Would this ruling
censor Wikipedia?

Also, who is defending Sci-Hub? Is there anyone who would be in a position to
challenge or appeal this ruling? Or do we have to wait for the ACS to demand
censorship from a registrar with balls?

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

~~~
Vinnl
I wonder that as well - I recently made
[https://whereisscihub.now.sh](https://whereisscihub.now.sh), which parses the
Wikidata API to always link to an available version of Sci-Hub. Technically,
it just transform content from one location to a different format, but yeah...
It might stop working if Wikimedia would be forced to remove their links.

Anyway, Alexandra Albakyan (who is behind Sci-Hub) is unlikely to defend it
with anything else than written statements, given that she's from Kazakhstan
or Russia and is unlikely to come to the US given several earlier injunctions
against Sci-Hub.

------
rdl
Sci-Hub: the Internet’s second most censored publication. (And altogether
easier to support morally, ethically, aesthetically than the first one.)

Boycotting ACS seems like a nice idea, but it would be challenging for
professional chemists.

~~~
arkades
Wait, what’s the first?

~~~
rdl
Daily Stormer, which has gone through 20+ domains in the past 18 months, was
the first site to get kicked off Cloudflare for content/no court order,
constant attacks on hosting facilities, etc.

~~~
ashleyn
Is it truly "censorship" though, if one is so aggressively distasteful and
difficult to deal with that nobody wants to do business with them?

Daily Stormer was taken down as a result of 0 court orders. If I'm on
someone's platform and I either break their rules repeatedly or invite attacks
on them, it's not exactly censorship if they get tired of putting up with my
shit and remove me. VPS operators repeatedly warn me that if I invite frequent
DDoS attacks, they will remove me from the service. They have a say in how
their own platform operates.

White national socialists/identitarians sell themselves as the most censored
people on the Internet as if they hold information just begging to be released
and practiced. Only, there's no redeeming value to the content of their
information; it ranges from callous disregard of people based on race, to the
outright extermination of anyone who disagrees with the cause. All of these
"beliefs" effectively incite people to attack them, regardless of how well you
may articulate them. It's little different from me repeatedly challenging
blackhats to disable my VPS.

The only thing they really succeed in doing, is being the Internet's biggest
pain in the ass to do business with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with
what Cloudflare did.

~~~
apotheothesomai
Removing something perfectly legal, because public opinion is against them is
cowardly.

Being a company that advertises DDoS mitigation and then drops a customer,
because they get attacked a lot, is a cop out.

Being a company that will argue that they are not responsible for what their
customers post legally, while by contrast dropping customers based on their
content is pretty much censorship.

Don't think for a minute that dropping Daily Stormer wasn't just about public
opinion and turning bad PR into good PR.

~~~
andreareina
Cloudflare didn't drop Daily Stormer because of public opinion, but because of
claims by Daily Stormer that Cloudflare supported Daily Stormer:

 _Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years
about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt
angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and
remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these
claims of secret support by Cloudflare._ [1]

Dropping them for that is 100% justified in my book.

[1] [https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-
stormer/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/)

~~~
Sacho
Why couldn't have they made a public statement that they do not endorse the
Daily Stormer, reasserted that Cloudflare's business is not political activism
and warned them that future claims like this would lead to termination? After
all, Cloudflare's CEO describes the act itself as "dangerous", as a one-time
act that would never happen again(at least, until someone else does the same
thing?), etc..

The CEO doesn't seem to agree with you on this being 100% justified:

> Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what
> I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this
> morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. … It was a
> decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure
> company.

[1] [https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-
to...](https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to-neo-nazi-
site-1797915295)

(I was unable to source the claims that the Daily Stormer made about
Cloudflare supporting them. I seem to remember the Daily Stormer denying they
made those claims. It seems pretty important to know the actual catalyst for a
major breach in company policy, but it doesn't seem to be reported anywhere I
looked).

------
otakucode
It's interesting that this sort of thing is happening just as more and more
research is piling up showing that the old peer review publishing model is
less effective in every possible way than open publishing on the Internet.
Errors get caught faster without journals involved. Corrections are published
faster without journals involved. Bad science doesn't stick around as long
without journals involved. They're just not a thing we need any more. And this
is where we will find out how they actually feel about the notion that the
thing which provides the better value should win in the market.

~~~
prepend
Can you get grant funding without them?

~~~
otakucode
I don't know enough about grant funding to hazard a real guess. That is an
interesting issue, though. I presume that grant committees are not typically
staffed by people well-versed in the subject area? Would they not be capable
of recognizing a global acceptance of an applicants prior work without a
fallible journal citation? I know that in many fields the amount of other work
which cites a given publication is a very important factor, perhaps that would
play a role?

What position would it put journals in if they were reduced to providing
vetting for grant committees? If instead of being arbiters of scientific
validity, which they are poorer at than open publishing, they simply become
some sort of thing similar to ratings agencies that provide parents with an
unreliable best-effort guide to content acceptability without needing to
actually learn about the thing in detail?

~~~
prepend
For the US at least, grant committees are almost always staffed by people with
subject area expertise.

For NIH, there are two levels of SME- one non gov and one gov.

------
Pyxl101
Does SciHub need an actual domain name? Could they provide their website on a
well-known IP address, kind of like CloudFlare's 1.1.1.1 DNS? Other people
could build websites that redirect to or reference this known IP address.

(Or can IP addresses be seized too? I assume not, or else I'd expect the
actual SciHub website to be shut down, not just the DNS names pointing to it.)

Edit: It looks like SciHub is in fact available on certain IP addresses. The
following website lists a few of them:
[https://whereisscihub.now.sh/](https://whereisscihub.now.sh/) \- one example
is [http://80.82.77.83](http://80.82.77.83)

------
dooglius
We ought to have some kind of DNS alternative that doesn’t allow this sort of
thing to happen.

~~~
LeoPanthera
They could just operate a .onion to work around the whole thing. I think they
already do?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _They could just operate a .onion_

scihub22266oqcxt.onion [1]

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-
Hub](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

~~~
bigiain
The article mentions that that onion address is in the list of domains that
are "included but not limited to" in the injunction.

Good luck to ACS getting a .onion address seized... WHatever their legal
injunction says.

~~~
hokus
Its more funny than that. The onion addresses are now published in that very
document for everyone to find.

~~~
Vinnl
I mean... That's theoretically funny, but I don't think anyone who knows what
a .onion is had any problem finding Sci-Hub's.

------
walterbell
*> Several service providers are not receptive to US Court orders. One example is Iceland’s domain registry ISNIC and indeed, at the time of writing, Sci-Hub.is is still widely available.

Why is ISNIC different?

~~~
guelo
I think one of the biggest factors is that they run their own registration. A
lot of the little countries outsource their registration to american companies
such as verisign. ISNIC says they will only take down a domain on order of an
Icelandic court.

~~~
walterbell
What kind of domains have Icelandic courts requested to be taken down?

~~~
Geimfari
I haven't been able to find any instances of the courts requesting take-downs.
But the registry has removed some ISIS domains on their own accord.

~~~
computerfriend
ISIS must be peeved they can't get the cute is.is URL.

~~~
zaarn
I'd buy that domain and run something fun on it. No idea what but I'm sure
there is a list somewhere.

But that would probably not end well for me. Or anyone associated with that
domain.

~~~
ben_w
Suggestion: Neopagan Egyptian-pantheon products.

(There’s also a river of that name in England, which caused some recent
problems for those nearby).

------
misterbowfinger
So confused. DNS registrars can be mandated to reject domain ownership? What
about DNS registrars outside of the US?

Also..... at some point we could just publish a list of IP's if we care
enough, right? Although that's less than ideal.

~~~
prepend
How would a Wikipedia DNS work? It seems like this would be a useful service
as people move toward some weird morality-based instead of law-based way of
living life.

This is a topic that I want to see if transhumanists have researched as this
becomes really important post-singularity.

~~~
Endy
Some transhumanists have done thought experiments and research on it, and I
would say that the most digestible version of the "morality-as-law" system is
in the Eclipse Phase RPG.

------
kevin_b_er
Is the article itself subject to the judge's prior restraint on the basis on
mentioning a known working website for sci-hub?

~~~
kevin_b_er
Further, does this discussion page itself "facilitate access" by virtue of
people mentioning a working sci-hub website?

What limits are there to the gag order? How much rights do you have left to
speak of sci-hub online? Do you have any?

------
sterlind
I run a rare disease wiki, which makes extensive use of sci-hub links to
bypass journal article paywalls. Patients (including myself) can't otherwise
access research on their own conditions.

How should I keep my links working? Should I link to stable IP addresses?
Mirror papers to IPFS? Link to the onion address, via a public tor gateway?
Host my own DNS server to point at sci-hub?

Bonus points for keeping https cert validation working!

~~~
Y_Y
Host the documents yourself?

~~~
gpvos
Not everyone wants to deal with lots of teardown notices and other possible
fallout.

------
ChuckMcM
Distributed detached root DNS anyone? A twitter bot that returns IP addresses
to #icanhazscience ? I don't think they can prevent this.

~~~
Kadin
Another comparatively difficult-to-block option is a bookmarklet that runs
some JS to retrieve the latest IP address from some server somewhere.

I don't really want to switch to somebody's random DNS servers to use SciHub,
but dragging a bookmarklet to your browser toolbar is pretty easy.

~~~
colejohnson66
Not my website, but:
[https://whereisscihub.now.sh](https://whereisscihub.now.sh)

------
woodandsteel
Could the articles be hosted on ipfs? I say that because one of ipfs's stated
goals is overcoming censorship.

~~~
StavrosK
They could. It's a bit inconvenient to pin things now (you can't just say "I
want to pin 5 GB of SciHub") and IPFS is slow to resolve new content, but it
should work very acceptably.

~~~
shliachtx
I'm not sure if this would work, but what about hosting a node that you can
manually add to your bootstrap list? Would that make getting the content
quicker?

Edit: Oh, amd why couldn't I just pin the top node of the dag recursively?
Wouldn't that basically do what you want?

~~~
StavrosK
> what about hosting a node that you can manually add to your bootstrap list?

I tried that and it didn't help :/ I think there's a bug in fetching content,
because I was requesting the files from a node connected directly to mine
(which I knew had the files) but still could not retrieve them. Hopefully
0.4.14 will work a bit better.

Wouldn't pinning the top node of the DAG pin everything? How would you
restrict it to X GB?

------
dredmorbius
If you can't remember what domain(s) Sci-Hub is on this week, why not make it
all of them?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you_cant_remember_what_domains_scihub_is/)

------
dman
I really wish the publishers got together and started a netflix like service
for journals. I would gladly pay to use such a service per month.

~~~
posterboy
you are mistakenly believing netflix had an extensive up-to-dat3 catalog. They
do not, in comparison there are many netflix-like distributors of science
papers. Google Scholar, sci hup and the like bind those together.

~~~
dman
Any pointers for an aggregator that has acm/springer/ieee?

------
jdkram
Sci-Hub bot on Telegram is still up:
[https://t.me/scihubot](https://t.me/scihubot)

------
arca_vorago
The publishers are an enemy of a free Web, and we mus not let them encroach
upon our territory without repercussions, or else the next thing we know the
Web will look like cable TV.

------
dayaz36
Does a blockchain alternative to sci-hub exist yet?

~~~
akx
Blockchains aren't useful for storing large amounts of data, so this probably
won't happen. Blockchain as a distributed database + IPFS maybe.

~~~
LyndsySimon
Blockchains can be good for storing _links_ to large amounts of data, but that
doesn't directly solve the fundamental problem here.

Storj[1], as I understand it, is an attempt at decentralized storage of large
amounts of data. I'm curious if it could be used to host papers in a way
that's difficult or impossible to censor?

1: storj.io

------
philip1209
What would happen if they started writing the articles to a blockchain? It
would be functionally impossible to remove, right?

~~~
Dylan16807
If you start a blockchain made of copyright violation, it's going to be
legally about the same as a torrent, and you'll get hit for connecting at all.

~~~
userbinator
There's already plenty of legally questionable stuff in Bitcoin's blockchain:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16617136](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16617136)

Thus, it would be better (if it could be afforded --- see some of the other
comments on cost estimates) to continue there, or perhaps one of the other
altcoins that's already in use for monetary purposes.

~~~
Dylan16807
It's very incidental, though, and most of it could be purged with mild effort.

~~~
chroma
The whole point of a blockchain is that it's append-only. Each block has a
hash of the previous block. If you wanted to modify a Bitcoin block from a
year ago, you'd have to do the same computation as a year worth of all miners.

~~~
Dylan16807
The blocks are hash trees, and you don't need to store the whole tree. Purging
depends on that, not altering the block history.

------
zokier
While I think the change Sci-Hub is driving towards more open access is a good
thing, I do also feel like Sci-Hub is destined to be the martyr here. From the
big picture this is more just the pieces going through the almost inevitable
(in some form) motions that will get us hopefully ultimately to better future
(with legitimate open-access), but that won't be helping Sci-Hub whose
position from a purely legal perspective pretty clearly in the "wrong" side.

~~~
prepend
So was MLK and people made the same argument and (horribly and sadly) he was.

Obviously, copyright on publicly funded research isn’t the same priority as
civil rights in the US, but hopefully we learned enough so we don’t make more
martyrs for just causes.

The “dumb law is illegal, therefore let’s follow it anyway” is not something I
agree with by default. There are quite a few laws that need fixing.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
I think a problem with that mentality is that it's antidemocratic. Basically
you're saying that potentially the only laws you'll recognize are those with
which you agree.

If other citizens were to also adopt that policy, we'd literally have anarchy.

~~~
LyndsySimon
From the standpoint of American government it was never intended to be a
democracy. "Democracy" was feared by the Founders, who saw it as mob rule.

As for picking and choosing what laws one recognizes as legitimated, Rev.
Martin Luther King, Jr put it better than I can:

> One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying
> others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just
> and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not
> only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one
> has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St.
> Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

\---

> If other citizens were to also adopt that policy, we'd literally have
> anarchy.

My first response to this is that we _already_ follow this policy. Have you
ever exceeded the speed limit? Have you ever consumed an illegal substance?
Have you ever fixed something in your home that requires a permit without
obtaining one? The simple fact of the matter is that everyone violates the
law, every day, consciously or not.

My second response is to question whether or not this form of anarchy, where
each individual is responsible for their own actions and communities are
responsible for establishing and enforces their own standards of behavior
through social pressure, is a bad thing at all. I don't believe it is.

