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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

#321

Post by andbberger »

School-Cotton wrote: post #316
andbberger wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly they can. What's forcing you to publish in nature? Just like... don't. If someone down the line is judging you based on what journal your work ended up in and not the quality of the work... well you probably don't want to work with them anyway

Are you in academia? Not trying to be snarky here -- genuinely want to know your perspective. As an outsider, everything I know about it leads me to believe that academia is so competitive that you really can't afford to just "not publish in top journals" and be picky about who you work with/what offers you take.

I am in academia, I just don't care to play the game.

An academia that cares about journal over quality of work isn't really one I want to be a part of, so either way I'll be happy with the outcome.

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

#322

Post by Bartweiss »

School-Cotton wrote: post #314
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.

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.

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

#323

Post by driverdan »

zeta0134 wrote: post #70
edwinyzh wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but I don't know much about 4chan - why block 4chan?

4chan is a relatively popular anonymous image board, based on a Japanese language image board (2ch) but with mostly English language users. It's administration are known to be quite lax with content; if it's not outright illegal to host they'll generally let it slide in their NSFW boards. To use a recent example, their Adult GIF board right now, while flooded mostly with pornography, is currently housing uncensored f…

Nothing you described justifies a block.

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

#324

Post by Bartweiss »

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.

This is a good point; it's amazing what's still out there. Bitrot does set in over time, though, and the less distributed a work is the worse its odds of living through each new tech transition. I've known people who still have cassette recordings of concerts that are publicly considered "lost". Hopefully they digitize and back up, but not all of them will.

Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.

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

#325

Post by alexis_fr »

seszett wrote: post #125
alexis_fr wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that was appalling. I guess the directors were expecting the SWAT/GIGN to come, but hours passed and they had to sign documents, and the signature was deemed valid. I don’t even know if the directors were fed or could gonto the bathrooms during that hostage situation. Torture at its best.

You don't have to look very hard to find better examples of "torture" than being kept for a whole day within an office (with access to the bathrooms obviously, nobody was forced to pee in their pants).

A whole week, if I remember.

Then again, when it’s not enforced and when you know how violent union people can be, you don’t know how long you’ll stay there, and if you will get out alive at all. You only know when it’s over.

What I’m furious about is that the signature should have been considered under duress. It was not.

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

#326

Post by titanix2 »

orbifold wrote: post #68
titanix2 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably some negative impact. Sci-hub is the primary and in some case only way to access paywalled papers at master and undergrad level. I’m not sure how PhD students get access to them but if it through libraries this is bad for them as the opening days and hours of such institutions is limited. Even more so which strikes which sometimes close a library for weeks.

You can typically get any paper your university library has a subscription to via the libraries online portal or if you are in the university network already at the undergraduate and masters level. If some journal is not available at the library you can request an interlibrary „loan“ which just means that someone at another library will copy the article and send it to you, typically for free.

I have been registered as a student in 5 French universities and I can tell you that even if I can get "any" paper if I can enter a library (which is a joke in itself), sci-hub is 10 times more convient than the bureaucracy involved. The only time I requested a book from the stock, the librarian didn't even give it to me pretexting it was lost... probably because did like me as I had an unopened sandwich in hand.

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

#328

Post by Bartweiss »

yipbub wrote: post #194
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.

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 have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available.

I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.

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

#330

Post by Myrmornis »

SciHub and LibGen seems like very different things. They're both extremely useful. However, surely the ethical situation is very different? For SciHub I see little ethical problem: the authors of scientific papers never expect royalties and will almost universally welcome free access to their publications. No-one's going to shed tears on behalf of scientific publishing companies; they had their time, in the era of type-writers, but nowadays we can create our own PDFs, thanks very much.

LibGen on the other hand I'm fascinated by. Most people I meet have absolutely no idea that a vast proportion of all commercially-produced (more or less technical) books are available for convenient free download. And while I would love for that human knowledge to be freely available to everyone on the planet, we do have to concede that many of those books were written by authors on the understanding that it was a commercial project and they would receive income for it.

Do people generally agree with the above distinction? I feel that this thread (and perhaps the French government / courts) should be making it more clearly.

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