41–50 of 123 posts
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http://sci-hub.cc/ works in the UK
This is from Cambridge? Eduroam or uni ethernet?
It's shocking to me that your university administrator has put a block in place on a website that isn't obviously malicious.
VPNs are cheap. In this case, I think it's worth it to invest in one.
Cached, as the original seems to be unable to handle HN traffic. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8Y_lcTf...
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It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.
Bitorrent kind of does this anyway, because in order to download one file, you need to download the entire block it's in. In a case like this where you have a large torrent with many small files, that will actually cover quite a few other files. If you ordered them strategically, you could even try to make sure every block has a fairly popular file in it.
One thing that worries me with Sci-Hub is that even though they put all of their PDFs on the torrent, it's too much to mirror by one individual. It would be nice if they implemented some scoring system that would help others mirror the most popular papers or if they worked like thepiratebay - just associating names to magnet links. It would be much easier to help work around the single point of failure then. Right no…
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If there are nonetheless economic consequences for the publishers, the end result will be the trimming of some fat.
Or, god forbid, creating value that isn't available elsewhere. You know... competition. Why use netflix, when you can get TV Shows/Movies for free? Why use Pandora/Spotify when you can get music for free? Why use Steam when you can get games for free? Dropbox? Microsoft Office? Because those service(s)/product(s) offer something that the free version(s) doesn't... If Elsavior is losing customers because of Sci-Hub, t…
Since it's just a login/access to proxied logins, Sci-hub has a third option which they will most definitely double-down on: try to "fix" the log in problem they have.
As important as I do think piracy is for situations just like this, the problem with trying to understand piracy in a market environment is that piracy doesn't really follow the same rules as other market elements. While there may be some economic value to pirates, for the most part, they can compete on cost and free of the trappings of business deals. They don't have to worry about making a profit, and as such are not influenced by the responses from other elements, such as those they're pirating from.
This isn't "oh woe to the publishers"; I do think they've been bending us over forever. But to expect them to respond to piracy as they would another business is unrealistic in my mind, especially when they can just regulate and sue their way to their goals.
What hopefully happens as a result of Sci-hub is that it will change the way that researchers and their institutions look towards paper publication in the future, once they realize that there's no longer a need for Elsevier and its kin. That is change I hope happens. But to expect Elsevier et. al. to do anything but try to return to their status quo is kind of absurd.
One thing that worries me with Sci-Hub is that even though they put all of their PDFs on the torrent, it's too much to mirror by one individual. It would be nice if they implemented some scoring system that would help others mirror the most popular papers or if they worked like thepiratebay - just associating names to magnet links. It would be much easier to help work around the single point of failure then. Right no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If there are nonetheless economic consequences for the publishers, the end result will be the trimming of some fat.
Or, god forbid, creating value that isn't available elsewhere. You know... competition. Why use netflix, when you can get TV Shows/Movies for free? Why use Pandora/Spotify when you can get music for free? Why use Steam when you can get games for free? Dropbox? Microsoft Office? Because those service(s)/product(s) offer something that the free version(s) doesn't... If Elsavior is losing customers because of Sci-Hub, t…
Measures like geoblocking just drive people in markets who are blocked from accessing content, or who are charged higher prices, to just pirate the material. Or alternatively they bypass the geoblocks.
Even now people are starting to ignore the various mechanisms used to bypass geoblocks as its getting harder to achieve, but before publishers start congratulating themselves they should consider that those people who bypassed their geoblocks were willing to pay what they consider a far price for that content. The fact is, in most cases they bypass the geoblocks because the pricing is not fair.
I'm not sure these publishers can legitimately claim how unfair it is that people steal their content when they are literally discriminating against people by charging them higher prices based on their nationality.
There may be an ethical weight you can assign to stealing and a lower ethical weight you can assign to price gouging, but they are both unethical.
I often find it interesting when I bring up the fact that there is a fundamental unfairness to geoblocking that people immediately chime in to state that stealing is wrong, but they don't consider that a case can also be made that price gouging is really a form of theft of a consumers limited resources.
The one thing I've not seen mentioned yet in the Sci-Hub discussions is that the national level academic ISPs seem to have put a very effective domain and IP address block on SciHub. I've tested this both from UK and Scandinavian university networks I have access to, and none of the SciHub domains nor the direct IPs are accessible. Can anyone in the US or rest of Europe with university access test this? It's certainl…