381–386 of 386 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you give me an example?
What.cd hosted, among other things, three unpublished Salinger stories. They were swiftly taken down by the site hosts over demands from his estate, but narrowly made it onto BitTorrent and other sites, and are still available today. Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still ha…
proxy to afghanistan for free books <3 yalla yalla
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know a lot of researchers and they can access maybe 90% of the papers they want through subscriptions and for the rest the likely use Sci-hub. (I have never heard anyone in research who thinks that pay walled journals is a good thing.)
As an researcher I typically only encounter a paywall when I‘m not logged into my institutes VPN. In the rare cases I want to read something the university is not subscribed to, Scihub is indeed a good solution. Open access just moves the cost of publishing to research groups and disincentives proper peer review, because the journal’s revernue is tied to how many paper it publishes. See for example the 15+ Frontiers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What.cd hosted, among other things, three unpublished Salinger stories. They were swiftly taken down by the site hosts over demands from his estate, but narrowly made it onto BitTorrent and other sites, and are still available today. Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still ha…
This is the negative of private invite-only trackers like what.cd. If they end up closing a lot of data gets dies with them. In contrast to that piratebay and nyaa.pantsu regularly upload their databases and there are even offline database readers for them.
Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable.
Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.
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…
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 pira…
However, do note that from the outside, there's nothing wrong with the ability to create their model. I like that freedom. What is wrong is that we're all feeding it, sponsoring it with government money, and indeed putting what should be our shared knowledge into a private archive.
This is why I believe that the proper way forward is to simply not use them, while allowing their existence. Only if they somehow force their use, or disallow/inconvenience authors' attempts to release their content elsewhere should we take legal action in the form of writing laws against it.