French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by derefr » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #188

vanderZwan wrote: post #142

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…

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.

Given that those were torrent sites, they weren’t hosting the content. The individuals seeding the content still likely have copies of it. They just have no easy, obvious place to share it where they won’t get in trouble for doing so... for now. But if such a technology shows up later, the (already ripped and preserved) content might just show back up along with it.

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

#302

Post by bitwize » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:55 PM UTC

solstice wrote: post #4

Why do the French have such a hard-on for copyright enforcement? (Honest question)

It's a part of the French literary and artistic tradition. In France (and elsewhere on the Continent), authors and artists are considered to have inherent rights to their work that are stronger than normal copyright, including the right to be named as the author and the perpetual right (transmissible to heirs after death) to control how their work is presented and consumed to some extent -- hence the phrase droits d'auteur (authors' rights).

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

#303

Post by setquk » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

oarsinsync wrote: post #205

setquk wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. I suffered Virgin for a couple of years and it was hell. Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month. They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month. Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.

> I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. Try doing that today with 5 people all trying to watch Netflix. That wasn't a thing back in 2002.

I'm only talking 2 years ago. And we do have netflix and it's simply tough shit!

In 2002, I had 1mbit.

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

#304

Post by nerdponx » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

fhood wrote: post #300

xorand wrote: 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…

Just remember. Not everybody studies particle physics. There are fields where there are no other options .

That's bullshit. Universities and professors have all the power; they just choose not to use it. The journal name means a lot, but so do the names of universities and well-respected researchers.

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

#305

Post by arghwhat » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #250

arghwhat wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what was being referred to is the legal standpoint. The paid journals are an absurdity, but there is only one right course of action: Not using them. Submit no content, pay no subscriptions. Let them whither and die. With more and more universities joining in on open access, this should become easier and easier. However, they still legally hold the rights to what they have, and thus releasing their content…

> gives them a chance to cry "Foul!". Do not give them that chance. They can cry whatever they want. I want them to disappear in great pain!

Then don't give them the legal weaponry to fight back.

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

#306

Post by arghwhat » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:02 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #276

arghwhat wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe what was being referred to is the legal standpoint. The paid journals are an absurdity, but there is only one right course of action: Not using them. Submit no content, pay no subscriptions. Let them whither and die. With more and more universities joining in on open access, this should become easier and easier. However, they still legally hold the rights to what they have, and thus releasing their content…

> However, they still legally hold the rights to what they have, and thus releasing their content in public is still illegal. You'd have to get the original authors to legally release it elsewhere, which they might not even have the rights to. Most scientists still hold the rights to their articles. You can often e-mail a professor if you need additional information, artifacts or code for reproducibility. Yes, it's h…

In that case, all it takes is the cooperation of the authors to publish their content elsewhere. The question is whether the professors are only okay providing it to you, or if they're okay with it being made openly available. If they retain the rights, it should be fine for it to be published in parallel elsewhere.

I was a bit careful about stating that its all on the authors, as it is entirely legal for the author to give up their rights to a work (and I wouldn't have been surprised if the journals did that to avoid risk of lost revenue), in which case the hands of the authors' would be bound.

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

#307

Post by 0815test » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:14 PM UTC

class4behavior wrote: post #272

stale2002 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best way to get a law changed is for everyone to be breaking it all of the time. Laws only works because everyone follows it most of the time. If everyone is breaking a law, the government can't punish everyone, and eventually people start to wonder why it is a law in the first place. We've seen this happen with other laws in the past, quite often. Pot legalization comes to mind.

Everyone is the magic word here. Reality isn't that trivial unfortunately and we aren't talking about instances where this approach worked, but whether this kind of approach is justifiable as a general procedure. While pot legalization is going well, there's also an opioid crisis. Does that mean we should further deregulate the opioid industry? Beside, the majority isn't necessarily in the right either. That's why no…

>> The best way to get a law changed is for everyone to be breaking it all of the time.

> Everyone is the magic word here

Unfortunately the "everyone" in this case is just a handful of centralized services - because data-hoarding, like so many other things, becomes vastly cheaper when you do it at scale. It turns out that Sci-Hub and LibGen are not so different from YouTube, FB and other SV unicorns - their vulnerability to legal shenanigans of various sorts is exactly the same!

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

#308

Post by xhrpost » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

dTal wrote: post #238

yipbub wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

That's a shame. Looks like this one song managed to get on Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Thsq5haec2ixuguqiep4bnfzcmi?...

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

#309

Post by komali2 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #301

dTal wrote: 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.

Given that those were torrent sites, they weren’t hosting the content. The individuals seeding the content still likely have copies of it. They just have no easy, obvious place to share it where they won’t get in trouble for doing so... for now. But if such a technology shows up later, the (already ripped and preserved) content might just show back up along with it.

The /r/datahoarder subreddit is full of people like this. I'm happy they exist, if nothing else so at least there may be a digital record of our civilization if it's destroyed.

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

#310

Post by vanderZwan » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 3:34 PM UTC

orbital-decay wrote: post #253

Vaskivo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember a torrent site for old games. You had tremendous community efforts documenting and cataloging games. Gathering every thing from the different releases, patches, music, art, etc. It was a gaming historian's wet dream. They were even beginning to record the releases from different warez scene groups. But everything went away because, form what I gathered, someone in EA noticed you could download FIFA 96 for…

It was Underground Gamer. The quality of the collection was astonishing, many games were impossible to get or purchase anywhere else due to abandonment. And everything just disappeared overnight. People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.

> People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.

I so dearly hope this is true for other sites like What.CD