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Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

bjoern.brembs.net

111–120 of 160 posts

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#111
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would let content creator to decide what to do with his creation. I believe the author can do anything with it. For example, burn it, or set a price of $100500 per bit of information, and require customers to crawl on their knees ingratiatingly asking to buy it. Of course, no one would buy it that way, but author has ultimate right on his/her creation. One of those rights is to sell it to big unproductive but power…

Respectfully disagree. There is an implicit acceptance of the current copyright system and the laws regarding copyright as it stands, in your comment. Look at the big picture, we have created a society that thrives on imposing artificial restrictions on everyone and the only people who benefit from it are big corporations. By giving complete rights over the invention to the inventor or a corporation, we are limiting…

To answer your last question: Civilization would have progressed faster, people would still be able to think and the economy would produce more things that are actually valuable.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#112
post #106
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's not poor here? I have many material goods and earn a lot of money, but I have thousands of debt. I am poor by a lot of criteria. You're not, because you have everything you want by stealing it, you self-declared pirate.

I was assuming that "poor" was defined as approximately equal to or below the USA's poverty line. https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FP... What criteria do you default to when defining the "poor" class?

You assume too much.

Remember that you assume that being poor allows you to break any moral principle.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#113
post #99
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May be even using something like DHT on top of WebRTC could allow to upload/download those papers easily.

There's a thumping amount of data there. 485 torrents, each torrent containing 100 zips of around 500MB each, each zip containing 1000 papers. Total = 500MB * 100 * 485 ~ 25TB. If your have a 10Mbit/s link into your house, it's 280 days of continuous downloading. New torrents seem to be appearing at the rate of 14 per month = 700GB/month = 2.7Mbit/s. For the majority of people, I'd say it is beyond any one person bei…

I would assume that most of that is due to PDFs weigthing a lot more than their content.

If someone wants to donate IT skills and coding time (this is a thing that I've read several times in HN), perhaps it would be great that someone puts together a system that takes a PDF, OCRs it when necessary, detects images and graphs, and uses all of that to create a light version of the document (html/latex/markdown/whatever); and then puts all of those TB through that tool.

The reduction in storage and network costs might be a lot more than a standard donation!

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#114
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was assuming that "poor" was defined as approximately equal to or below the USA's poverty line. https://www.healthcare.gov/glossary/federal-poverty-level-FP... What criteria do you default to when defining the "poor" class?

You assume too much. Remember that you assume that being poor allows you to break any moral principle.

I surely assume too much.

Your assumption that I am morally unimpeded because I am poor is wrong though. By assuming too much about me I am glad to see that you understand irony.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully disagree. There is an implicit acceptance of the current copyright system and the laws regarding copyright as it stands, in your comment. Look at the big picture, we have created a society that thrives on imposing artificial restrictions on everyone and the only people who benefit from it are big corporations. By giving complete rights over the invention to the inventor or a corporation, we are limiting…

To answer your last question: Civilization would have progressed faster, people would still be able to think and the economy would produce more things that are actually valuable.

Are you implying that the WWW is something noxious to civilization, thinking and economy and therefore it's failure (caused by being patented and monetized) would have been beneficial. Or are you implying that if patented and monetized, the WWW would have been even more successful than it is and have a beneficial effect on civilization, thinking and economy.

If this isn't sarcasm I think either interpretation can be easily disproved.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#116

Can anyone explain why it is not possible to publish your work as a PDF or to a free/open platform at the same time you submit it to the journal? It this somehow prevented legally in the terms of the journals?

I'd also be interested in this answer. What I have done is email researchers directly asking for a PDF and they have been happy to give me one. Often some of the authors have their own site where they add links to their own papers.

Now, is this because these authors are exercising their own right to distribute their work, and many other authors don't want to expend that effort? The copyrights don't change after all, so collating these and redistributing could also be the same as sci hub.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#117
post #82
post #6

I am poor, which I use as my primary excuse to pirate software, movies, books, etc. To those who are not financially struggling: Why do you pirate? What is your moral justification?

Poor is not a 'moral justification' for anything. I believe in open access, but I heed the if 'I can justify a lie, I can justify murder', the proverbial 'slippery slope' of ethics. I grew up poor, and I did not use it as a justification to breech any of my moral principles. While I agree the exorbitant pricing, and pay walling do not benefit the world, do not develop newer business models as technology progresses, I…

> Poor is not a 'moral justification' for anything.

I believe it actually is, morally speaking, but it's just not a very good one in this example.

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SCi-Hub used hacked or shared university account to abuse the university proxies to get content. For big research institutions, it's an annoyance. To small colleges and university library it is a major headache that can get the whole university locked out from resources the library is paying dearly for. Source: My partner is a librarian at a smaller university, this happens every few months and they lose access to ma…

I feel like you're blaming the wrong party here.

The "blaming" is in your head. People who explain how things happen do not "blame".

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#119
post #23

Does anybody know how to find the corresponding torrents for the papers that sci-hub has fetched? Is there some sort of prefix I can punch into torrentz.eu?

i think scihub uses various proxies in multiple universities to fetch the articles.

They also back up every paper on bittorrent! :)

Re: Sci-Hub as necessary, effective civil disobedience

#120

Does anybody know how to find the corresponding torrents for the papers that sci-hub has fetched? Is there some sort of prefix I can punch into torrentz.eu?

There's some torrent files right here[1]. They're nearing the 50mil landmark, as hou can see. [1]: http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/

Brilliant, thanks!

(Feel free to post other sources if you know of them ;) )

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