81–90 of 160 posts
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When I did it on a regular basis? "I want it, and I know how to get it without negative consequences.". It's no moral justification, but neither is "I'm poor".
I agree, but I think "I'm poor" is better than "I want". Neither completely justifies.
I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?
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> Maybe [...] we won't be able to practice it anymore. Do you mean by suppressing the action before it occurs? I thought that one of the points of civil disobedience was to get caught, so as to increase visibility of the problem and become a catalyst for change.
A quote from Orwell's essays: >At the same time there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forbearingly as that he was always able to command publicity. As can be seen from the phrase quoted abov…
It becomes much harder when the oppressors can use a small and dedicated mobile murder-force.
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Most answers only touch the issue of piracy of scientific articles, but let me answer your more general question. I believe that copyright is immoral, hence "piracy", for me, requires no further moral justification. Copyright is a racket, established by rent-seeking, mostly unproductive but powerful individuals/corporations. It's a cartel/monopoly that discourages market competition, one of the most important inventi…
I would let content creator to decide what to do with his creation. I believe the author can do anything with it. For example, burn it, or set a price of $100500 per bit of information, and require customers to crawl on their knees ingratiatingly asking to buy it. Of course, no one would buy it that way, but author has ultimate right on his/her creation. One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but power…
That sounds simple, but it's not.
Imagine this scenario: Disney makes a poster to advertise a Mickey Mouse. They display the poster in public. You (someone with no contractual relationship with Disney) see the poster, and decide to make kids' toys that look like the character in the poster.
How would your principle apply to this situation?
Civil disobedience is an important form of democracy. Maybe in the future, when all of our calls, messages and identities are monitored in full by our benevolent overlords, we won't be able to practice it anymore. Right or wrong, faraway anti-Western countries have served as counterweights against the West for Snowden, Assange and Elbakyan.
The fact that Snowden's leaks were made possible by insecurity, and now seemingly everyone is against insecurity, is ironic enough that it makes me wonder if that was really the intent all along...
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If you aren’t affiliated with a university, scientific papers cost something like $30/each to read. If papers can be accessed for free, then the only expense required to follow cutting edge science is time, and everyone with an internet connection can join in. At $30/paper, suddenly only the rich (or those with rich patrons, such as tenured professors at rich universities) can afford to play. Researching a topic, it’…
There is another solution - interlibrary loan. While it takes longer, you can often get papers for free or for a flat nominal cost. The local college ILL service will make a copy of any article in the world for $10 for the general public. The public library where I used to live would make ILL copies for free. It's not a great solution, but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative.
The whole publishing scam is not about giving (or restricting) access from research to peons, it is to justify sucking the money of public institutions.
When the situation sucks for people, they get motivated to try to change the system. It is already hard enough for people to try to change things, because research is hard enough, and then if you start to refuse publishing in unethical journals the next idiot is going to do it as well as you would.
Comparatively, many people are for the status quo regarding copyright in general because they know very well that piracy is an option. At a RMS talk, the (university!) crowd mostly unanimously cheered when he said "yes piracy" and booed when he said "... thus we have to change copyright". He was then asked "but what if hollywood disappeared with the change?".
I'm surprised there aren't more comments here. Maybe it's because most agree, and there really isn't much more to be said? Anyways, thank you very much for sharing.
As someone who works at the edge of biology, I have noted that the publishing business reviews the papers get knowledgeable peer-reviewers(pressed for time) and then ask difficult questions of the authors. Some papers aren't good enough, they get rejected. This culling has some value, much as it irritates the scientists. Scientists are always trying to get their work published/sited and ranking journals is something that happens with some regularity http://www.citefactor.org/journal-impact-factor-list-2014_0-...
Of course, want to download an article on the first genome assembly of drosophila from 15 years ago... $30. (I can access articles like this though my work in academia, if I go though the library and cross my fingers the moon is in the right phase, the the pdf link might show up).
Holding knowledge and parsing it out for profits is somewhat suspect.
Note that anything US government NIH funded since 2005 is required to have access. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/about/public-access/
for example. This paper, published by a coworker in an official "journal" but still available for free via pubmed. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23443684
I get the "joy" of uploading lots of data from screens to the us goverment pubchem website. I'm not sure anyone downloads it, but its there. They have an interesting embargo system which holds the data till publication (I've never used that, some people really care about that stuff)
Researchers in academia also pass around papers. The peer reviewers do to, if they find something interesting. We've gotten requests for data from unpublished papers.
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There is another solution - interlibrary loan. While it takes longer, you can often get papers for free or for a flat nominal cost. The local college ILL service will make a copy of any article in the world for $10 for the general public. The public library where I used to live would make ILL copies for free. It's not a great solution, but if you have more time than money, it's a possible alternative.
Not sure I understand the reasoning here. It's bad to take things for free from scihub, so instead, take things for free from this other source which is much slower. The end result is the same, except the latter impedes research and involves a bunch of busy work for somebody.
By and large, the academic publishing industry operates in such a way that it ignores the internet ever happened. The internet says, "Hey, you don't have 'Kant's Third Critique of Judgement in your inner-city school library. Here, let me tell you what it says" the academic publishing industry says "whoa- you're not at an institution that pays us money - you don't deserve to know what this says." They try to make it s…