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In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

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Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#61

Post by samarthr1 »

2Gkashmiri wrote: post #14
zozbot234 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to imply that you could get most of the socially-desirable effects of piracy simply by instituting compulsory royalties for previously-published works that have since fallen out of print. As of today, most out of print works will simply never get republished and users who want to access them legally have to resort to substandard solutions such as the used market, or merely borrowing a legitimate copy of th…

i will try to explain my stand. 2005-12. a small "user" from india HAD 0 means to purchase online content. local content in the stores was the same expensive "imported" stuff and TV was the only main means of consuming content. then with internet, i could suddenly go to piratebay and watch any movie or read any book or download any game. talking about "buying using paypal and stuff", INDIANS STILL CANNOT EASILY BUY F…

A nit, the argument with be easier to read without the all caps in certain places. That's just personal preference though...

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#62

Post by marcosdumay »

thfuran wrote: post #56
zozbot234 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies like Moderna did dispense with IP restrictions around the vaccine, but it turns out that this was never a binding constraint in the first place. These vaccines must essentially be brewed via a biological process, not merely synthesized in a chemical lab like most pharmaceuticals. There's probably a whole lot of fuzzy know-how in this that's inherently hard to replicate, no matter what the legal environment…

Aren't mRNA vaccines quite straightforward to manufacture?

They are incredibly hard to manufacture. They are just all manufacture the same way with the same equipment, so if you can do one, you can do any.

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#63

Post by marcosdumay »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #18

Each time this subject comes up I feel moved to repost this article [1]. The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry". Brutal, radical reform is now necessary. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio... (turn off js to view)

> The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry".

That's quite an understatement.

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#64

Post by throw10920 »

> stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty

There's no contrast here - these things are a result of universities charging more to students and paying less to faculty - you're comparing one exploitative industry to another and finding them similar, not different. Don't paint the universities as the "good guys", because they're not.

The article makes some solid points (e.g. that Elsevier adds somewhere between "zero" and "negative" value to the academic process) - there's no reason for this silly language in there.

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#65

Post by npteljes »

aliqot wrote: post #58
npteljes wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device. My country's libraries doesn't really offer ebooks to borrow, my device doesn't support Amazon DRM, and Amazon Unlimited in not available in my region. So no, we don't have such a thing.

> With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device. We have this in my little town in USA for over 10yrs now. Movies and music and newspapers too. Only thing that this process doesn't have is microfiche.

I hope this comes to Hungary sometime!

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#66

Post by npteljes »

m4rtink wrote: post #57
npteljes wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device. My country's libraries doesn't really offer ebooks to borrow, my device doesn't support Amazon DRM, and Amazon Unlimited in not available in my region. So no, we don't have such a thing.

Frankly "borrowing an ebook" just does not make sense to me. After many millennia of humanity striving to preserve knowledge we now have a way to make unlimited perfect copies of books but instead of really making use of it we instead put an unnecessary complicated system in place that makes the book artificially unavailable after some time. Its like how early cars in Britain had to be preceded by a guy with a flag,…

Well yeah, at the end of the day, it's just another avenue of rent extraction. I do think that it would be a step up from the current system, where I just can't get ebook, end of story.

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#67

Post by LeifCarrotson »

marcosdumay wrote: post #63
nonrandomstring wrote: post #18

Each time this subject comes up I feel moved to repost this article [1]. The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry". Brutal, radical reform is now necessary. [1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio... (turn off js to view)

> The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry". That's quite an understatement.

Remarkably, it once was.

Cheap duplication of written data, conveying knowledge from one brain to another without requiring tedious manual transcription or oral explanation to each learner, started with the printing press in the 1400s and broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education, bringing book learning and literacy out of scarcity to the masses.

Even into the mid-20th century, academic publishing was primarily on paper and relied on expensive offset printing that only makes economic sense when printing runs of many thousands of copies, requiring a publishing industry to produce these documents.

Now, though, that "digital publishing" is available, this problem of scarcity no longer exists. The publishing industry requires scarcity to make their contribution valuable, and they can only create that scarcity artificially.

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#68

Post by remram »

zozbot234 wrote: post #13
RupertEisenhart wrote: post #9

This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy. They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here: - piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comi…

This seems to imply that you could get most of the socially-desirable effects of piracy simply by instituting compulsory royalties for previously-published works that have since fallen out of print. As of today, most out of print works will simply never get republished and users who want to access them legally have to resort to substandard solutions such as the used market, or merely borrowing a legitimate copy of th…

That's interesting. You could make Copyright closer to the way Patents already work: you get protection for your work, but only for as long as you're making it available to the public; once you stop licensing your protected work, you lose the protection.

So if you publish a work and later stop making that work available, it would automatically lose protection and it would become legal to share online or for another company to print.

Re: In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)

#70

Post by stainablesteel »

roter wrote: post #46

Related: Scihub's hearing before the Indian courts apparently has been moved back to Feb 2023 if I read the first comment correctly at the Reddit thread that is keeping track of the case [0]. The High Court website is non-reachable for me so I cannot confirm. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement... Edit: Confirmed as URL [1] finally worked. [1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_…

they've been doing this for more than a year iirc, a lot of people say it's going to be years before its day in court happens only to be delayed again when it finally happens

i don't honestly know why she's putting up with cutting out adding new papers for this when it was perfectly accessible before. it makes me sad but i hope something good eventually comes from it

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