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Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

bjoern.brembs.net

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Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#91

Post by gozur88 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #26
khedoros wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The basic problem with the "original formulation" of civil disobedience is that power structures have evolved to thwart it. Things that should by any right be a civil case or misdemeanor are instead charged as multiple overlapping felonies in order to coerce a plea bargain, which is effective to deter all but the most dedicated from demanding their day in court. Then the court won't allow you to make the case for jur…

>You can only make the case that the law is wrong to the judge, and no matter how stupid the law is the judge can only agree with you if it violates the constitution.

Well, yes. It's not a judge's job to strike down bad law. We're already too close to a system where the judiciary acts as a super-legislature.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#92

Post by notalaser »

_lpa_ wrote: post #90
robertwalsh0 wrote: post #80

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…

Asking for your money here refers both to a potential reader, and the the author of the article.

The latter is a point that's often forgotten, and is very true. I used to do research a long time ago, prior to deciding I'm not quite academia material. If I ever get nostalgic, I literally have to pay between 30 USD and 100 USD just to get PDFs of articles that I wrote.

Of course, this is upsetting only on a personal level, but the entire process is extremely toxic to learning.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#93

Post by agumonkey »

_lpa_ wrote: post #90
robertwalsh0 wrote: post #80

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…

Asking for your money here refers both to a potential reader, and the the author of the article.

Double ended market is a sweet position to be in right.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#94

Post by xvilka »

edraferi wrote: post #67
erikpukinskis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that important? I would be just as happy with an API that allows downloading articles one at a time.

The parent comment wants to efficiently mirror the content to prevent it from disappearing in the event of a successful take down operation. This can be done by scraping an API, but bulk methods are faster and less likely to degrade service for other users.

May be even using something like DHT on top of WebRTC could allow to upload/download those papers easily.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#95

Post by scotty79 »

bcook wrote: post #6

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?

Here's some:

1. Paying for information is immoral. You don't want to make withholding information from you profitable for people. You don't want to encourage this kind of behavior.

2. When I wan't to play a game or watch a movie I want to do just that. I don't want to play "decide if the thing's worth the price". It's tiresome and unnecessary.

3. In most cases I wouldn't want to consume the information I'm pirating if my information environment haven't been polluted by advertisement to make me want the thing. You pushed some information on me that I haven't sought without paying me for the use of my brain so I won't pay you for the information you are trying to sell.

4. Some software is priced at levels directed at corporations. Entities whose income levels vastly exceed their sanity. I'm individual. I can't afford that even if I'm rich for an individual. I still want to check out your software and maybe even use 5% of it's capabilities. I won't restrict myself just because you haven't thought how to satisfy me, neither I'll require that you think about me.

5. I'm a student. You'll get your money from the corporations that will hire me after I learn your software. Isn't that why you push your software in my school?

6. No. I won't play "pick the correct version/licence" so I can get the software as individual, student, scientist, whomever... I won't fill registration form. I'll just pirate the full version. It's easier and I don't want to stumble at artificial barriers.

7. Sharing is caring. I won't withhold the information I have from my friends especially if it effortless to share. I'll happily use information shared by my friends.

8. Business is trying to manufacture morality around copyright. "you wouldn't steal a bear.." and such. Listerine made you think your breath stinks. Flushable wipes people told you flushable wipes are necessary for you and flushable... Enough is enough. They can't be allowed to tamper with definition of theft.

9. Copyright makes lawyers flock to software. Lawyers tax everything they flock to. You should do anything you can to make lawyers move somewhere else or better yet stop being lawyers.

10. Copyright makes creativity very hard. You can't remix things without thinking "Do I have right to do that?" Not many people object to giving credit where credit is due. Many are prevented from acting by unknown, potentially exorbitant price they could pay for creating something that uses thing they took from internet. This kind of poisons creativity for a lot of people.

... I guess I'm out.

Any other creative moral justifications?

Or what are the moral justifications of not pirating software (beyond the obvious, creatives should be rewarded for they creation, and bit more sketchy, investors should get return on their investment)?

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#96

Post by austinjp »

pasbesoin wrote: post #10

One aspect of Aaron Swartz's case that I found both interesting and way under-reported, was that he supposedly was going to perform meta-analysis against the collected documents. And that a previous meta-analysis of a similar sort had revealed some surprising and useful results. With all the pieces locked up, it is difficult if not impossible to do such science and statistical analysis. In other words, it is antithet…

Tangentially related: is anyone here familiar with automated analysis of research papers? I feel this is a field that would perfectly lend itself to machine learning, or similar approaches.

It would require extraction of meaningful data, be therein lies the rub. There are several large projects looking into collecting/sharing scientific data, mainly focusing on persuading and empowering researchers to share their full data sets.

But what can we do where the raw data is not available? Is anyone working on ways to reliably extract data from the millions of PDFs in research databases?

There are several open-ended questions here. If anyone knows of work in these areas, or is interested in this, I'd be very keen to talk.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#97

Post by vasar »

austinjp wrote: post #96
pasbesoin wrote: post #10

One aspect of Aaron Swartz's case that I found both interesting and way under-reported, was that he supposedly was going to perform meta-analysis against the collected documents. And that a previous meta-analysis of a similar sort had revealed some surprising and useful results. With all the pieces locked up, it is difficult if not impossible to do such science and statistical analysis. In other words, it is antithet…

Tangentially related: is anyone here familiar with automated analysis of research papers? I feel this is a field that would perfectly lend itself to machine learning, or similar approaches. It would require extraction of meaningful data, be therein lies the rub. There are several large projects looking into collecting/sharing scientific data, mainly focusing on persuading and empowering researchers to share their ful…

Only materials related, but at http://www.citrine.io/ they do something like that. I recently attended a talk given by one of the team members (Bryce) and they seemed to be quite open to discussions.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#98

Post by smarx007 »

userbinator wrote: post #85
msvan wrote: post #5

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.

My biggest worry is the whole "security culture" that developed shortly after Snowden is encouraging more of the population to embrace locked-down walled-garden systems in which they can feel secure but have little freedom, and the general push for secure-by-default rather than open systems. A necessary condition for civil disobedience is the freedom to disobey, to defeat access controls, to exercise one's beliefs. T…

insecurity != openness

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#99

Post by femto »

xvilka wrote: post #94
edraferi wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment wants to efficiently mirror the content to prevent it from disappearing in the event of a successful take down operation. This can be done by scraping an API, but bulk methods are faster and less likely to degrade service for other users.

May be even using something like DHT on top of WebRTC could allow to upload/download those papers easily.

There's a thumping amount of data there. 485 torrents, each torrent containing 100 zips of around 500MB each, each zip containing 1000 papers. Total = 500MB * 100 * 485 ~ 25TB. If your have a 10Mbit/s link into your house, it's 280 days of continuous downloading.

New torrents seem to be appearing at the rate of 14 per month = 700GB/month = 2.7Mbit/s. For the majority of people, I'd say it is beyond any one person being able to mirror the lot.

It seems like an application for a Freenet type system, but one where the files are guaranteed to never be deleted, even if they are rarely accessed.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#100

Post by calpaterson »

robertwalsh0 wrote: post #80

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…

Scholastic publishing knows the internet happened. They have published articles electronically for decades at this point.

Reproduction costs are irrelevant to scholastic publishing. A technical solution to reproduction won't change anything.

Scholastic publishers make money through their monopoly on the legitimate use of articles and books. The question is more like "how long can you sustain a business that relies on the law?". And the answer is probably: a long time.

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