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Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

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Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#141

Post by devwastaken »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #11

Twitter has no business inserting itself into a dispute between Elbakyan and Elsevier et al. Few people would have issues if Twitter shut down the Sci-Hub account after they received a valid court order, but a private monopolist cannot be trusted to be the arbiter of what is permitted speech.

You don't want to get to the point of a court order. Expecting twitter to defend you when you're committing copyright infringement is ridiculous. They don't have to do it only when the platform is used for direct infringement, they remove the account before they can do that and before the legal problems.

This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#142

Post by SllX »

fastball wrote: post #46
SllX wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well our laws and legal traditions are a bit different than Germany’s Basic Law and Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch. In our case Twitter’s private property rights trump the President’s rights. The President is the President and the President can always get a message out if he wants ; Twitter on the other hand is not obligated to serve as a medium of Government communications and if they had IP banned the White House and Capi…

Yes, but I think the problem is more that we have a massively connected society but are relying on the good will of corporations to provide that connectivity.

Part of life is that unless you live miles from others and hunt, forage and fish, you are pretty much always relying on the goodwill of others. I don’t want to start designating some corporations as special just because we happen to like their service a lot, and part of just how unspecial they are is they remain mere private entities carrying out their own activities including enforcing their own property rights.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#143

Post by MikeUt »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #121
bananabreakfast wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what world is Twitter a monopoly? Its market cap is $36B. That's 2X less than Snap and 20X less than Facebook.

It's crazy isn't it? This community thinks Apple and Google are monopolies despite being competitors, ditto Twitter and Facebook. Microsoft isn't though. Not because they don't completely own the Desktop PC market just as they ever did, but because that market is less relevant than it used to be for web devs. I live in a strange time.

You live in a town with no fresh water, and the only drinks available are sold by the local store. This store does not sell bottled water, wine, orange juice, milk, or tea. The only drinks it sells are Coca-Cola and Pepsi. But if you don't like Coca-Cola, just buy Pepsi - how silly it would be to complain of monopoly when you still have a choice!

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#144

Post by unethical_ban »

rcoveson wrote: post #59
dankboys wrote: post #16

They’re a private company, Sci-Hub has to make their own social media service

Can't host it with Google or Amazon, though, as those companies are also willing to take you down before any injunction. DNS providers will also take you out if there's social pressure to do so; see the recent GoDaddy action against AR15.com. Not sure how you work around that. As for Internet connection, there was another recent action by an ISP which blocked access to Twitter. So you're not necessarily safe with you…

This point is why I believe DNS, network and colo services should only be taken down (for content) by legal order.

Social media is layer 7, I think it needs less regulation in that regard. It's like saying "you can't have your business in the phone book" vs. "you can't have a phone".

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#145

Post by kumarsw »

abnry wrote: post #21

I don't support piracy. So I don't support Sci-hub. But I believe that publishers are bilking the public and that publicly funded research should be made freely available. The real way to fix this is to disrupt the reputational incentives academics (and deans supporting this) have to keep publishing in these journals. For some reason, I think this is an unpopular opinion on HN.

There are legal avenues to do this. We already have Arxiv (admittedly not peer reviewed) and I believe that there are some open Wikipedia-style journals in the works as well.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#146

Post by missosoup »

maximente wrote: post #137
missosoup wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are monopolies within a set of respective markets/niches when it comes to speech platforms. GP's point was that private individuals have the power to arbitrarily deplatform speech they don't like, no court order required. The counter argument is 'go find another speech platform', but it doesn't work, because speech platforms have been monopolised by a single-digit handful of individuals.

i think there may be some conflating of "very powerful" (?) with monopoly here. it does not take much effort to realize that twitter is not a monopoly in the space of speech platforms. it's not clear to me that twitter is particularly unique as a speech platform: blogs minimally could serve this role, as could mastodon. more controversially perhaps: facebook/instagram. contrast that with a situation where you literal…

This is a logical fallacy and the equivalent of saying 'you are welcome to practice free speech, in this here sound-proofed room'.

Twitter is one of a small handful of platforms where an individual can share an idea and have that idea spread - as long as the owners of Twitter don't disagree with that idea. It's not because twitter is special, it's because it was one of the first to achieve a sufficiently large userbase.

Defending arbitrary censorship on these platforms as 'oh well it's a private entity so they can do what they like' misses the forest for the trees. Technology has shifted the power balance for free expression, and applying pre-technology laws and mindsets to it just empowers that small handful of individuals to manipulate public discourse even more. Twitter doesn't quite have a monopoly on speech, but it's damn close in terms of practical outcomes. The fact that the legal definition of `monopoly` hasn't caught up with that, doesn't change the matter.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#147

Post by oh_sigh »

generalizations wrote: post #66
rcoveson wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't host it with Google or Amazon, though, as those companies are also willing to take you down before any injunction. DNS providers will also take you out if there's social pressure to do so; see the recent GoDaddy action against AR15.com. Not sure how you work around that. As for Internet connection, there was another recent action by an ISP which blocked access to Twitter. So you're not necessarily safe with you…

I like that analogy. Also read on here recently that it's super hard to knock facebook offline because they own all the pieces, even their own domain registrar. Now I've been wondering how hard it is to set up my own domain registrar.

Can ICANN or some other body block you if they don't like the kind of domains you are registering?

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#148

Post by splistud »

tptacek wrote: post #97
insickness wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Ownership does not always mean absolute dominion. The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it." This from Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946), a case decided by the United States Supreme Court, in which it ruled that a state trespassing statute could not be…

Everything the court has done since Marsh v Alabama has walked that decision back, and I think you'll have a hard time finding legal experts to back the interpretation that Twitter owns the obligations of a public square. We've had threads about it on HN, but it's also (for obvious reasons) come up recently, and here's Ken White citing a recent SCOTUS decision knocking this idea down: https://twitter.com/Popehat/stat…

I wholly agree with you. They do, however, own the obligations of a public forum if that is how they ask to be regulated.

They are playing cute with political speech. They aren't publishing in the traditional sense. But heavy curation of independent content is (at their volume) publishing - without the regulation accorded publishers. They are, by their actions, espousing certain political ideas by only allowing those ideas to exist in their 'public forum'.

For anyone, even a staunch libertarian, to claim that the government should not get in their kitchen on that basis is naive in my opinion.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#149

Post by spoonjim »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #18
spoonjim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your opinion on their takedown of @realDonaldTrump?

The same. If he is seditious you can get a court to issue an injunction very quickly, and if he isn't a private entity has no issue determining what a politician can say. As a German one thinks different about free speech than do most Americans. We know all too well where too much free speech leads and when in doubt let the courts decide because we love public peace. Putting a muzzle on someone is interfering with po…

Twitter isn't deciding what Donald Trump says, it's deciding what he says on their website.

I wouldn't allow Donald Trump to give a speech from my backyard -- that's not an impingement on his rights.

Re: Twitter shuts down account of Sci-Hub

#150

Post by happyopossum »

devwastaken wrote: post #141
HarryHirsch wrote: post #11

Twitter has no business inserting itself into a dispute between Elbakyan and Elsevier et al. Few people would have issues if Twitter shut down the Sci-Hub account after they received a valid court order, but a private monopolist cannot be trusted to be the arbiter of what is permitted speech.

You don't want to get to the point of a court order. Expecting twitter to defend you when you're committing copyright infringement is ridiculous. They don't have to do it only when the platform is used for direct infringement, they remove the account before they can do that and before the legal problems. This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.

> This isn't about speech, it's copyright infringement.

Are they committing copyright infringement on Twitter?

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