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French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

torrentfreak.com

231–240 of 386 posts

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#231
post #215

This was demanded by Elsevier and Springer, as the copy of the order shows https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf . Every researcher who still is an editor of one of their journals is responsible for this. Any academic manager who supports these journals, either by buying them or by counting impact factor points, is responsible of this. People should know that all of these people who support this are paid fr…

Is responsible for what? I support efforts to use open-access journals whenever possible and putting these ungodly abominations out of business. But that's up to researchers and funding agencies, not up to "the Pirate Bay of science" or any other site that breaks the law. And while I don't think it's immoral or anything to use it, I do think it's somewhat shrill and disingenuous to act like its blockage is some kind of a civil rights/ free speech issue. It's a paper pirating site, guys. Getting blocked and closed down is part of the game. Calm down.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#232
post #215

This was demanded by Elsevier and Springer, as the copy of the order shows https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf . Every researcher who still is an editor of one of their journals is responsible for this. Any academic manager who supports these journals, either by buying them or by counting impact factor points, is responsible of this. People should know that all of these people who support this are paid fr…

Is responsible for what? I support efforts to use open-access journals whenever possible and putting these ungodly abominations out of business. But that's up to researchers and funding agencies, not up to "the Pirate Bay of science" or any other site that breaks the law. And while I don't think it's immoral or anything to use it, I do think it's somewhat shrill and disingenuous to act like its blockage is some kind…

While this area isn't my expertise. My understanding is that a large percentage of papers published have some Government funding.

I would really like to see research which is conducted with the public's money required to be entered into the public domain and currently that doesn't seem to be the case.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(...) but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses. The EU just passed the directive for the new copyright package which further cements the status quo (the two often mentioned articles are just the worst of it), so don't expect any progress if people don't start to elect more progressive politicians. The projections for the EU election sh…

It is clear reading your comment that you do this transformation in your head automatically: Progressive = Left = Good Right = Bad I don't believe that the access to what public funding pays (public research) is intrinsically linked to the left, quite the opposite. In the past for example while the US published a lot of information in public journals, Soviet Russia was very secretive about theirs(while benefiting fro…

AsyncAwait have a point here, the comment start with a "don't fall into simplistic extreme dualism.

Neither brightest human achievements nor genocide happen only under a single political orientation flag.

There are people that are admirably altruist and awesomely creative regardless of the main political forces going on where they live. And there are people seeking to concentrate always more power for themselves regardless of socioeconomic consequences for others under any flag of the day which would serve this purpose.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with this is that in a way it gives strength to their argument - i.e. segregation reinforces the concept of there being a fundamental difference between the two groups.

Well, practically, there absolutely is a difference. You can host above-board content any way you like, even on things like IPFS, and tell anyone who makes fraudulent copyright claims about it to sod off-- but if you're not being totally above-board, you won't get that luxury. It's a very different trade-off compared to the likes of SH and LG, and one that's quite valuable.

No, you still get that luxury.

Just until the people with guns come.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours wo…

Perhaps someone should painstakingly make a catalog of the internal web stacks of SV companies for people who love code. I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.

You're trying to make a snarky comment, but this is exactly what patents are supposed to do...

Reveal how inventions and large companies work, as opposed to the old cloak-and-dagger method of 'secret formulas' and such. Then allowing anybody to see the method and licence it from the company, or be liable for a lawsuit.

What we used to have is if somebody somehow stole the secret to an invention it became fair game. Nowadays though companies try to game the system by having intentionally labrinthian patchworks of patents that do their best to not reveal anything about how the invention works while still being able to be used to sue people.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#236
post #117

Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.

> Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours wo…

RIP Oink.me :(

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#237
post #215

This was demanded by Elsevier and Springer, as the copy of the order shows https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf . Every researcher who still is an editor of one of their journals is responsible for this. Any academic manager who supports these journals, either by buying them or by counting impact factor points, is responsible of this. People should know that all of these people who support this are paid fr…

Is responsible for what? I support efforts to use open-access journals whenever possible and putting these ungodly abominations out of business. But that's up to researchers and funding agencies, not up to "the Pirate Bay of science" or any other site that breaks the law. And while I don't think it's immoral or anything to use it, I do think it's somewhat shrill and disingenuous to act like its blockage is some kind…

Let's be clear who's being "pirated" from. Elsevier and Springer don't pay for the research, or for the rights to the paper, or even the peer review.

The only compensation they're giving anyone is "exposure". Given how little that is worth these days, the validity of the copyright assignments they hold are questionable at best.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#238
post #194
post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like hundreds of man-years, when you factor in all the editions, bootlegs etc that are now forever lost to time. This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.

Could you give me an example?

Sure. Mooi were formed in 1999, split in 2006, made a bunch of great music in between, and all that remains is this one song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk

The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours wo…

Well, they weren't torrent sites in the late 90s and probably not the early 2000s either. The Bittorrent protocol wasn't released until July 2001 and it took a few years to get popular. Back then, they were just servers you downloaded stuff from.

Napster started in 1999. Search was centralised, but downloads were p2p.

Edit: it shut down in 2001, and everyone I knew at the time was using it. vanderZwan might have misused the word torrent, but the rest of his post is spot on.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours wo…

Perhaps someone should painstakingly make a catalog of the internal web stacks of SV companies for people who love code. I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.

> I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.

Rightly so-- and nothing of value would be lost. SV companies don't have much in the way of "secret sauce", they just have $$$ to burn (from VC weenies buying equity stakes) for hosting costs and for developing increasingly-crappy web frontends.

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