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French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

torrentfreak.com

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

#331

Post by setquk »

Aromasin wrote: post #288
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.

We switched service providers 3 times during that year. We started with a 30mbit connection through PlusNet, then 60 with EE, then 300 Virgin. The only one that was usable was Virgin Media. I wish that wasn't that case, but it simply was. Internet was a contentious topic in our house, but having 7 people either playing games, watching HD movies, or streaming simultaneously knocked most ISPs down swiftly.

plusnet and EE are turds. Total turds. The worst of all of them to be honest apart from possibly Talk Talk.

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

#332

Post by int_19h »

freeone3000 wrote: post #284
class4behavior wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you allow illegal activity as a form of protest—when it is not the absolutely last option—, then you negate the legitimacy of the law in general. So even if you argue your illegal action was the best possible measure to move society forward, you still have to accept the consequences for breaking the law. In this case it is the presence of a legal device allowing to censor copyright-infringing sources which is bad;…

A law has no inherent legitimacy simply from being a law. It must either reflect a social more or uphold public safety or, at the very least, be useful as a rule. Should people be paid for the work they do? Yes. Should people be paid for the work of others? Maybe, if they contributed in some way. Should we pay an academic journal which charges fees for people to submit to them? No, that's absurd.

I think OP's point is that breaking any law undermines the principle of rule of law in general.

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

#333

Post by fhood »

nerdponx wrote: post #304
fhood wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you miss the point. If there is one journal that specializes in your particular field, what else are you supposed to publish to? And if you aren't publishing to somewhere that your colleagues read, you aren't producing meaningful science.

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

#334

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

vanderZwan wrote: post #142
mateo1 wrote: 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…

>And then it all was destroyed.

We still have communities like that, but you need the right connections to get in.

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

#335

Post by vmchale »

Bartweiss wrote: post #322
School-Cotton wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires collective action. An individual can't meaningfully influence the situation.

Tenured professors can, at least? They're not going to fix the problem alone, and if they want to switch universities later they'll probably take a career hit in impact factor. But that's still very different from the postdoc/adjunct/non-tenure-track case where people who buck the system don't get positions, and so no one can sustainably push back.

Tenured professors generally care about the grad students and postdocs under their tutelage, which can push them towards submitting to a closed journal.

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

#336

Post by c22 »

arghwhat wrote: post #243
leereeves wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

But the content they have represents a significant slice of humanity's knowledge that we have all worked hard and paid for. So if we allow these giants to wither and die but we don't rescue this content (currently possible only via illegal means) then don't we risk losing access to it entirely? To me, a moral action is one which confers the greatest benefit to humanity, so from this view these scurrilous science pirates may be legally wrong, but morally correct.

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

#337

Post by whatshisface »

fhood wrote: post #333
nerdponx wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you miss the point. If there is one journal that specializes in your particular field, what else are you supposed to publish to? And if you aren't publishing to somewhere that your colleagues read, you aren't producing meaningful science.

Particle physicists did it, though. They managed to organize. If your field has one Elsevier journal to which everything is published all the better, because that means an alternative will be easier to promote with emails and at conferences. If your field is small, coordinating a shift away from journals is easier than if it is massive.

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

#338

Post by layoutIfNeeded »

Dirlewanger wrote: post #269
yipbub wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you give me an example?

what.cd. I only used it sparingly, but apparently they had a lot of rare releases that existed nowhere else. Vanished overnight with the feds taking it down.

Actually it was a reverse proxy that was taken down, and they didn’t even target what.cd, it was collateral damage. The admins got scared nevertheless and pulled the plug.

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

#339

Post by adrianN »

jessriedel wrote: post #278
adrianN wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Germany, linking to illegal content is also illegal (IANAL), so they could sue Wikipedia or whereisscihub.now.

Does the link have to be directly to the illegal content, or just to a domain that supplies illegal content somewhere on the domain? The SciHub homepage is not itself illegal content.

The topic is so murky that I don't think anybody can tell with any certainty. The German Wikipedia has an article that discusses the issue a bit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zul%C3%A4ssigkeit_von_und_Haft...

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

#340

Post by degenerate »

k_ wrote: post #37
emptybits wrote: post #18

And with this news, millions of French now become aware of these tempting sites they wouldn't otherwise even know about. (And Google methods of alternative access.) #streisandeffect

With a lot of proxies (in the linked document (french) [0]) I didn't know about; perfect! [0]: https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf

Never heard of https://unblocked.krd - cool site.

Thanks Elsevier & Springer!

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