Meet the woman who put 50M stolen articles online (2016)
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
That's a racket.
The concepts of "stealing" an idea, i.e. taking credit for someone else's, and "stealing" someone's spotlight occur in standard vernacular [1]. These don't concern depriving someone of something they have, but depriving them of something they could have had. The logic behind modern copyright is that distribution someone else's content deprives them of potential sales, royalties, et cetera.
There is reasonable debate around whether science, particularly taxpayer-funded science, should be copyrighted. But arguing you can't "steal" the intangible runs counter to our culture. A more productive line of argument lies in attacking what can be copyrighted and for how long.
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=steal_INF+idea...
Whose culture?
The culture that surrounds me seems organized almost chiefly, and at least largely, around radical freedom of information.
I... didn't do that. I don't think? Did I?
And there is not really a case of "stealing" an idea--which is incidentally one of the most tiresome claims anyone ever makes--but rather distributing the fully-credited articles through alternative channels.
The issue is not intangibility. The issue is scarcity and ownership.
Theft is (or rather, ought to be) when you deprive someone of a scarce resource they can claim ownership over. If they can't claim ownership of it, or you're not depriving them of anything, then it's not theft.
Any given idea, after it has been conceived, is obviously not scarce; the reproduction costs for an idea are essentially zero. You can't deprive someone of any idea by copying it.
The question, then, is whether you can claim ownership over the control of an idea (i.e. who is allowed to know the idea, and how they are allowed to apply it). To me, that seems insane, but obviously not to everyone.
But copying an idea without taking the credit isn't stealing in the English culture I am part of.
"Yeah, but if I could burn a copy..."
I suspect if you cut out the number the Independent hand out for free via hotels it would be even worse. I think now they don't even have a physical edition?
These guys must pay next to nothing and demand articles that get "eyeballs", produced in little time.
Plus all are captive to their main advertisers: cars, banks, realtors.
Why not just read blogs?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-student-put-50-mil...
Is this a case of two globally oriented forward looking publications that are embracing new distribution mediums?
I've never read the other ones really - maybe this in itself gives a hint, though I am just a sample population of '1'.
When I was a researcher I published articles in closed journals because that's just how the game is played. But the publishers can go to hell as far as I'm concerned. In public discussions I've occasionally seen professors take the publishers' side against open access or pirates. I've never seen graduate students be anything but grateful for easy access to articles. (Of course with this comment I am just begging for a contrarian graduate student to write an ode to the reader-pays model.)
'“People often say to me, ‘You don’t pay the authors. You don’t pay the reviewers. You hardly print anymore. The Web is free. Why do you charge?’” said H. Frederick Dylla, the former director of the American Institute of Physics and board member of the Association of American Publishers. “It sounds like a compelling argument. But it actually isn’t.”'
or this one:
"“So is it fair then if some high-school student wants to really follow the Supreme Court and doesn’t have the money to pay?” Greco said. “Life is a bitter mystery. We can’t give everything away for free. It’s not that kind of country.”"
I now want to use these for everything. 'Why can't we have sane housing prices in SF? Because the idea that regulation has something to do with it sounds like a compelling argument. But it isn't. The truth is, life is a bitter mystery.'
Please, donate. The best library i've ever used - free, accessible and easy to use - just what library should look like in 2017.
That has not been my experience. In fact, I'm amazed at how when I paste a paper title into sci-hub, I get immediately redirected to the paper's PDF. I doubt such a service could be provided by Google Scholar or by the commercial publishers even if it were not for the pay walls.
HN, what is your opinion on all this?
I have my reservations about leaking political or classified information in some cases, because as Wikileaks has demonstrated, leaks can be used to push a political agenda, rather than serve the cause of unbiased truth.
But scientific knowledge benefits the progress of humanity as a whole - the truth doesn't have a political agenda, although it certainly can discredit political axioms. Trying to keep it contained, controlled or limit its access to a select few should be considered a crime against humanity.
Even scientific research on how to build a functional nuclear bomb?
But what would the alternative be? That only the governments which discover how to build a nuclear bomb understand how it works and what its effects are, and get to threaten the rest of the world with impunity?
I'm not certain that would be better than the world where everyone at least understands the underlying science, even if not everyone can build one.
Everyone does understand the underlying science (or can find it pretty quickly on the internet), but very few understand the engineering specifics.
Beating the competition to make more money is the primary goal behind corporate R&D expenditures. It's essentially a form of investment, which means that it has to eventually make the company some kind of return.
The great thing is that we get the results of breakthroughs in the form of publications, patents, and eventually we see them in products. Sometimes the company decides to just release the results royalty-free: a great example of this is Volvo and the modern seatbelt.
Maybe not, but I think even for-profit research should alwats be made freely available at some point, regardless of its value. The financial incentive may be necessary but to me it's a perverse incentive.
And if the results don't generate money, how will you continue to support research projects in the future?
Modern scientific research is a very expensive endeavor. You could probably get scientists to do this "for free" back when a field was still in its infancy. Now you need a whole team of researchers and an entire support system to make even the smallest of scientific breakthroughs.
And by the way, universities also aim to generate a profit (usually fed back into the institution). For example, most universities take a 50% cut of whatever external funding a professor manages to get. They do provide things in return, but the key point is that they're making money off of research.
I'm speaking from an idealistic and naive point of view, but I don't want capitalism or politics to determine the limits of human self-awareness for future.
Then again, when it costs millions or billions of dollars to make breakthroughs, it does seem untenable to ask scientists to starve for the sake of the common good, and just expect the money to come from "somewhere" without strings attached.
[1] - http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-york...