
Judge Recommends ISP and Search Engine Blocking of Sci-Hub in the US - davidgerard
https://torrentfreak.com/judge-recommends-isp-search-engine-blocking-sci-hub-us-171003/
======
alexandercrohde
For those with any moral ambiguity around sci-hub, as an american citizen
simply trying to research questions like "What chemicals that act like
estrogens are in my public water, and in what dose?" you unfortunately cannot
effectively without either purchasing articles at $45 each or using sci-hub.

~~~
tzs
There are a couple other options available to a majority in the US:

• Many libraries have free online access to very large journal collections and
are open to the public.

• Deepdyve.com. It's kind of like Spotify for journals. Unlimited online
access to a very large collection for a fixed monthly or annual fee.

~~~
akg_67
> Many libraries have free online access to very large journal collections and
> are open to the public.

Most US public libraries don’t have access to ‘scientific’ journals. Only
educational and research institutions libraries subscribe and provide access
to their faculty students and staff. Most univ libraries are not ‘officially’
open to general public.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Most univ libraries are not ‘officially’ open to general public

Public universities generally, and some private universities as well, have
(ususlly non-free, but also usually inexpensive; e.g., UC Davis is $60/yr)
provision for public privileges.

------
FTA
Ever since I heard about Sci-Hub, I knew judgements along this line would be
incoming eventually.

The only way to solve the science publishing problem is from the top down:
lean on scientific funding agencies for them to mandate results must be
published in an open access journal. Take it a step further and say none of
this "pay-us-super-extra-money-on-top-to-open-your-article-up-early" garbage
either.

Hesitation from many scientists to publish in open access is that many full
open access journals are not as popular and thus you lose some impact or
credibility to the works when publishing in them. But if everyone is forced to
migrate to open access, that will go away--perhaps with a few years of
turbulence.

Otherwise, the behemoths like RELX and Wiley will endlessly pursue any sort of
effort to open up their copyrighted material (and rightly so within their
legal rights), just like the RIAA and music sharing.

~~~
clarkmoody
_> The only way to solve ... top down ... mandate ... everyone is forced_

Or you could think carefully through the incentive structure of the scientific
publishing system to see if there are places where small tweaks could go a
long way. This is a system that emerged over centuries, and using your top-
down hammer may change it in the short-run, but it will invariably morph into
something unintended and unexpected if the proper incentives are not in place
to guarantee long-term success. And I don't think those incentives should be
another dose of your hammer.

The landscape includes many parties: researchers who produce papers, journals
that publish papers, consumers who read papers, institutions that pay for
journals, institutions that fund research, and institutions that employ
researchers. There are probably more. All of them have different costs,
preferences, and incentives. Disentangling that web may yield some very good
opportunities for improvement, either as policy, advocacy, or
entrepreneurship.

Don't get me wrong for a second: I'm not defending the copyright lobby and its
obscene partnership with the state.

~~~
kerkeslager
What is your objection to simply solving the problem? Why is it unreasonable
to have public funds go to publicly-available research? Is there some reason
that we as a society should care if rent seeking middle men who provide no
value are disenfranchised?

It sounds to me like you're so slavishly devoted to Silicon Valley economics
that you want to incentivize nails rather than use a hammer.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The answer to your question is literally in the first paragraph of that
comment.

> _This is a system that emerged over centuries, and using your top-down
> hammer may change it in the short-run, but it will invariably morph into
> something unintended and unexpected if the proper incentives are not in
> place to guarantee long-term success._

I.e. scientific publishing, like _almost everything else that involves humans_
, is a _dynamic_ system. Smash it, and it will reconstruct itself in some form
or other. If you don't change underlying incentives, you'll end up in a
similar state with which you started. See also: comments that refer to
"regrettable substitution" in the comment page here.

It's not "Silicon Valley economics", it's just a basic application of reason.

~~~
csydas
I think the difference here is that the system itself is vestigal; JSTOR et.
al. made sense when there was not a convenient collection or distribution
method for journals, but at this point, such groups are not providing any
actual benefit that could not be replicated for an extremely minimal cost by
the journals themselves, or just abandoning the cost altogether. Already, many
fields have started publishing pre-prints for free on various sites and the
model works fine.

I appreciate caution as much as the next person, but we've been operating with
the natural alternatives for some time now without any issues; the incentives
for researchers and universities when it comes to publishing articles hasn't
really changed, nor has the incentive for the the public (academics or
otherwise) that want to consume them. The only part of this system that has an
incentive to keep the old system is the publishers themselves, because they're
no longer a required component. Their infrastructure and their pricing schemes
are no longer beneficial and have been replaced, while the incentives for the
researchers publishing and the audience consuming are provided and met by the
replacement systems.

Removing the publishers isn't a hammer destroying it from the top-down, it's
an appendectomy like prodecure.

------
ballenf
If this moves forward it would be unprecedented in the US:

> If the U.S. District Court Judge adopts this recommendation, it would mean
> that Internet providers such as Comcast could be ordered to block users from
> accessing Sci-Hub. That’s a big deal since pirate site blockades are not
> common in the United States.

This isn't just routine domain name forfeiture, this could escalate to an
order requiring ISPs to block IP addresses, which is far more troubling.

Am I missing something?

~~~
megous
It will never work. At least without some vpn blocking distopia.

~~~
csomar
It will not work but it'll evolve into something similar to the great firewall
of china.

~~~
inimino
In other words, it will work.

------
Nyrkki
The judge who "recommended" this is the same one which in July 2013 issued a
warrant for the arrest of Edward Snowden..

> Source :
> [https://ballotpedia.org/John_F._Anderson](https://ballotpedia.org/John_F._Anderson)

~~~
matt4077
Lets not ascribe to malice what can easily be explained by "I wish the law
didn't allow for this. But it does".

I mean: I'm as sympathetic to Snowden as anybody. But it's pretty obvious that
the law, as it currently is, allows for his prosecution. Judges are among the
last remaining people sometimes allowing for larger ideals to trump the
immediate business, and this "rule of law" they seem to cling to may come in
handy some day.

~~~
thriftwy
Once, it could.

Twice, it means they've found a very special person for this.

------
jancsika
So here's a simple question:

Why hasn't the maintainer of sci-hub backed up the existing content up in a
series of publicly-available torrents-- either by category, or if that's too
difficult even arbitrarily with the torrents enumerated?

Especially now, when it's obvious it's only a matter of time before the
service gets blocked. E.g.: "Sci-hub is temporarily down until you fools
replicated all these things."

~~~
davidgerard
This has, of course, long been the case:

[http://libgen.io/libgen/repository_torrent/](http://libgen.io/libgen/repository_torrent/)

[http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/)

[http://libgen.io/dbdumps/](http://libgen.io/dbdumps/)

~~~
toomuchtodo
Anything else one should be archiving in cold storage besides these links for
sci-hub?

------
abhishek0318
"Sci-Hub itself doesn’t seem to be too bothered by the blocking prospect or
the millions in damages it faces. The site has a Tor version which can’t be
blocked by Internet providers, so determined scientists will still be able to
access the site if they want."

~~~
olympus
Or you can purchase a VPN subscription that lets you connect through different
countries. I have one that lets me connect through dozens of countries and
it's faster than the Tor network. It isn't iron clad security, but it gets
around any geo-based IP blocking, and would work in this case as well.

------
forapurpose
The fundamental problem is that we use the wrong tool to solve the problem of
academic publication:

We use the free market, which limits distribution to those who can pay the
most in order to maximize profit - that's how the tool is intended to work.
That's great for some things, such as laptops, but it works against the
mission of scientific research, for which the mission is to advance knowledge,
advance the world, and solve important problems.

Unfortunately, our society now dogmatically applies the free market hammer to
almost every problem, nail, screw, wheel, or fragile crystal vase. If only
Einstein had thought of it - how much could he have sold the theories of
special and general relativity for? How much could Watson and Crick cashed in
for? Tim Berrners-Lee?

~~~
rvern
A free market is a “market in which trade is unregulated by government; an
economic system free from government intervention.”[1] Copyright is a monopoly
enforced by the government on the use and distribution of an original work.[2]

The tool we use for academic publications is copyright, not the free market.
The free market outcome is Sci-Hub. The monopoly-enforced-by-the-government
outcome is Elsevier, the RIAA, the MPAA, rent-seeking by the aforementioned
organizations, proprietary software, and DRM.

The fundamental problem is indeed that we use the wrong tool to solve the
problem of academic publication. We should use the free market, instead of
government-enforced regulation.

[1]:
[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_market](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_market)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right)

------
devrandomguy
It sure is frustrating that a site whose only purpose is to serve documents,
and is created by people who advocate Tor, requires JavaScript for all
navigation. Even the "about" anchor in the footer has an onClick _instead of_
an href. What were they thinking?

Heck, a vanilla Wordpress install would have been sufficient for this, if they
don't have resources for anything other than a free off-the-shelf solution.

------
woodandsteel
The basic problem for the publishers is technological advance.

Publishing became a big industry due to the invention of the printing press.
And because publishing a book requires a printing shop that can be easily
located by the police, it was practical to pass copyright laws that forbid
counterfeiting.

With the invention of the internet, piracy become trivially easy and basically
impossible to block, and so copyright laws are simply not enforceable. I think
the publishing houses realize this, and are just trying to hold off their
demise as long as possible.

~~~
manquer
It is not that simple. Content curation and editing is just as big part of
publishing as distribution is. Technology has only solved the distribution
problem. It still takes lot of expensive human work to select the good quality
works and proofread /edit/ peer review them etc before it is fit for
publishing in a decent journal.

Ppl are more than willing to pay for legal content if it's in consumable form
in a reasonable price point as Netflix and spotify have shown successfully.

~~~
ferdterguson
> It still takes lot of expensive human work to select the good quality works
> and proofread /edit/ peer review them etc before it is fit for publishing in
> a decent journal

Good thing that almost all of that expensive effort is done by volunteer
scientist editors and reviewers. I routinely see spelling errors and english
errors (going against journal guidelines for British/US english) in scientific
literature. I'm convinced publishers do as little proofing as possible.

~~~
madhadron
For the major journals (Nature, Science, Cell, PNAS), they don't do any. There
is no copy editing. That's the author's responsibility now.

------
rdiddly
So SciHub just became part of the dark net.

"The Darknet - nobody goes _there_ except people interested in crime, porn,
and... science."

~~~
sitkack
Science is a subset of crime.

------
ackfoo
This is wonderful! I had never herd of sci-hub, but now I have bookmarked
them. Anyone know where I can contribute money to their legal defence fund?

~~~
matt4077
Click on that bookmark of yours and their "donate" button?

------
harigov
This is why making journals publicly accessible isn't a technical problem as
much as a legal or policy one. Otherwise, this will just turn into a cat and
mouse game with enough legal ramifications for those who use it.

~~~
modzu
dont universities pay for subscriptions, so most academics can already access
these materials via their own library? where does the number 4 million come
from? i figured sites like this are broadening access to scientific literature
to people outside the institution -- who otherwise would not be subscribing
anyway (maybe im wrong?)

~~~
moftz
No university will subscribe to everything so there are plenty of academics
that may require journal articles that they either aren't subscribed to or
can't get on loan form another university. Unless the school has given you a
budget to pay the $35+ per article, then using a site like sci-hub is the only
choice.

~~~
codedokode
But scientist and professor job is well paid in America, 35 dollars should not
be a problem, compared to the costs a student pays to the university each year
(hundred thousand dollars), right?

~~~
AlotOfReading
Academics can afford individual papers, but they read dozens to hundreds of
papers a month. Add in the fact that many of the papers needed are simply to
even check if they're relevant and it's incredibly hard to justify.

Also, American unis don't charge $100k/yr. Half that is enough for an ivy.

------
Iv
Fuck US copyright laws. This is a case where disobedience is a moral necessity
while society weeds out the parasites that maintain that situation.

------
TeMPOraL
Even if this goes through, I'm hopeful that the cat-and-mouse game with
torrents, third-party mirrors, Tor and IPFS will take enough time for the
scientific publishing industry to die anyway.

~~~
drvdevd
Seriously. Can anyone here explain what value they’re currently adding?

------
ColanR
Is there any way to download the docs en masse to serve as a mirror? I imagine
the total is in the tens of terabytes (at the very least), but maybe a
physics-related mirror would be possible for one person.

~~~
koolba
How about a TOR hidden service? You wouldn't need to cache anything though
bandwidth may be an issue.

~~~
inetsee
Sci-Hub has an onion address ("scihub22266oqcxt.onion") for access through
Tor.

------
mnm1
Can someone explain how such an order is legal and doesn't violate search
engines' first amendment rights? As a search engine how can I be compelled to
comply with this when this case has no relation to me? Furthermore if I an
forced to comply how is that not a violation of my rights to free speech? And
why should I be forced to spend my resources essentially censoring for the
U.S. government? Is it now illegal to link to sites that may or may not have
copyrighted content? Am I going to have to follow every single U.S. case going
forward and keep on censoring for the government forever? Last I checked, this
wasn't child porn, just simple web links.

~~~
bubblethink
This is as legal as any other DMCA takedown. Replace movie with a pdf. That's
all that has changed. All other arguments remain the same.

------
tmnvix
I can't help but feel that the ongoing push for ISP blacklisting of sites is
only going to make VPN usage commonplace - to the point where it is more
common than not.

When do they come for the VPNs?

------
zitterbewegung
Yea, this happens every few years with these sites. They get taken down and
then someone redoes them. Sites like this are probably going to be redone
every few years until things change.

------
AlexCoventry
From the brief: "the public interest favors an injunction, as there is a
"public interest reflected in the Constitutional protection of copyright, and
the congressional enactment of the Copyright Act, is enhanced by issuance of a
permanent injunction where copyright infringement has taken place.""

Which public interest?

[https://torrentfreak.com/images/scireportrect.pdf](https://torrentfreak.com/images/scireportrect.pdf)

------
lifeisstillgood
Is "public interest" a defence here? As an outlier, let's imagine someone
discovers _the_ cure for cancer, and publishes it via Nature. Who then demand
a billion for each article viewing.

I can easily see a public interest defence succeeding in this made up case, so
where is the line?

~~~
eesmith
The restriction is on copyright. If a cancer cure is published in Nature then
I can take the facts from it and publish it. Copyright does not apply to
facts. Others can then use my publication for their own treatments, without
access the original paper.

To get to your question of "public interest", one argument for Sci-Hub is
precisely that:

> In her defense Alexandra Elbakyan has cited Article 27 (1.) of the UN
> Declaration of Human Rights "to share in scientific advancement and its
> benefits",

It's very unlikely that it would work in the US. I think issues related
copyright ownership of scientific publications was resolved 40 or so years
ago. I vaguely recall it was coupled with changed to the Copyright Act of
1976.

At the very least, that's about the time you start seeing explicit copyright
statements appearing in scientific publications.

~~~
xvilka
Too much money on stake. Publishers will surely bribe or apply pressure
somehow to the judges, or anyone on their way.

------
drvdevd
We’re entering an era where the public will start to become more interested in
technical Scientific publications generally, IMO.

At some point the “prestige” afforded by research gatekeepers will reach a
point of diminishing returns for professionals looking to publish.

------
LeoPanthera
I thought sci-hub was only available as an onion. I'm genuinely surprised
they're available on the open web.

~~~
Sharlin
I'm pretty sure 99.99% of sci-hub users don't know how to use Tor and wouldn't
bother learning.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Tor Browser makes it practically one-click these days, doesn't it? You can
even get Tor browsers for iOS/Android.

~~~
ameliaquining
That still requires you to download an app, which is significantly higher
friction than clicking a link in a browser.

------
danharaj
VPN usage amongst academics suddenly skyrockets.

~~~
CoolGuySteve
It's ironic that our academics might have to employ the same tactics as
Chinese academics due to government censorship.

~~~
cookiecaper
That's copyright for you. Its purpose has been totally inverted, and now,
rather than functioning primarily as the artificial constraint on supply that
allows people to market their intellectual goods, it's mostly used by big
companies to quash competitive threats and silence dissenters (pretty much
what you'd expect from an aggressive speech control like copyright).

Copyright is so ingrained into our assumptions and culture that we almost
never think or talk about it, but it's the beating heart behind _so much_ of
what drives the biggest companies today.

Consider that massive logistical operations that deliver critical supplies to
people across the country every day, like Exxon and Walmart, are rivaled by
companies that just print out DVDs. At some point we need to look at this and
ask ourselves why these people are allowed to use a strictly artificial,
government-granted monopoly to capture returns so disjointed from the social
utility they provide, and think about the bigger picture effects of awarding
them that excess.

Copyright and the CFAA are a disastrous tag team for online entrepreneurship,
and the mechanism by which Google, Facebook, et al enforce their effective
monopolies. The CFAA makes it illegal to get content over a network without
having permission first, and copyright makes it illegal to _load those pages
into RAM_ whether you're authorized to download them or not.

Of course, when Google et al were brought to task for their ignorance of these
laws, after dozens if not hundreds of small sites doing very similar things
had been mercilessly crushed by the legal system, the judges magically felt
that Google's use was "fair" (see _Perfect 10 v. Amazon_ ).

IANAL but people grossly underestimate the draconian reach of copyright
legislation. And that's not really an accident; media outlets don't want
attention on this, because they know if people realized how bad these laws
are, their gravy train wouldn't last much longer.

~~~
Karrot_Kream
I wasn't aware of the combo of CFAA and copyright. Are there any blog posts
describing amendments and court cases regarding CFAA/copyright that a layman
can read into?

~~~
cookiecaper
The unexpected copyright component is known as the "RAM Copy Doctrine". If I
recall correctly, _MAI v. Peak_ [0] was the case that established that, and it
has been referenced in web scraping cases many times since.

RAM Copy Doctrine is the digital equivalent of stating that a new infringing
copy of the work is created every time someone looks at something without a
license from the rightsholder, since it creates a "fixed" copy in the retina.

Effectively, this neuters _Feist v. Rural Telephone_ [1] for online purposes,
because you can't use a computer to "look at" the source material in order to
reference it's non-copyrightable facts.

The computer formatting that encapsulates unoriginal, _Feist_ -style data
almost automatically meets the standard of originality necessary to constitute
a copyrightable work (e.g., document structure like XML tags or JSON layout),
so under the RAM Copy Doctrine, just loading that small shell into RAM for any
purpose, even if it's just to read out non-copyrightable facts, may well
constitute infringement.

This argument has worked against many scrapers. And of course, under the CFAA,
speaking to their servers without explicit permission is of dubious legality,
and continuing to speak to their servers after being told to stop is
_certainly_ illegal. In most cases, both of these arguments are brought and
both arguments are considered persuasive.

Eric Goldman's blog [2] usually does a decent job following cases that involve
the CFAA and/or web scraping, IMO.

Legal threats along this axis are apparently so frequent that Goldman set up a
form letter telling people that he can't answer their legal questions. [3]

I am not a lawyer.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Computer,_Inc).

[1] [https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/property/property-law-
ke...](https://www.casebriefs.com/blog/law/property/property-law-keyed-to-
singer/intellectual-property/feist-v-rural-telephone-service-co/)

[2] [http://blog.ericgoldman.org/](http://blog.ericgoldman.org/)

[3]
[http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2014/02/why-i-...](http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2014/02/why-
i-no-longer-respond-to-unsolicited-inquiries-about-legal-matters.html)

------
mindslight
I'm more concerned by Netflix et al brainwashing people into supporting the
content cartels than a purchased judge verbally masturbating. The more reasons
for every person to move to secure protocols, the better.

------
fractal618
Nuts

------
modzu
outrageous

