Hacker News Reader

Comment by raister | Hacker News Reader

Is this legal?

Of course not. Copyright law is extraordinarily restrictive, and you, me, and everybody you know is guilty of violation after violation, easily enough to bankrupt hundreds of millions of people if strict enforcement were applied.

SciHub is all normal copyrighted published work; The publishers claim the same commercial status as an album or novel. The fact that there are currently 69 million works bundled means that willful copyright infringement of them has statutory damages in excess of 10 trillion dollars, perhaps multiplied by the torrent seed ratio if the judge is feeling generous.

Plainly, our present copyright system is ridiculous, and ridiculously disproportionate. It's also (separately) morally outrageous to restrict scientific inquiry to institutional subscriptions, for work that was submitted for review for free. This is commonly acknowledged in academia however, where every other person is willing to help you get access to that paper or this preprint to help out.

The law of the land and the feelings of its population have an enormous disconnect here. The only thing preventing the two from colliding head-on and something reasonable coming out of that contact, are the fact that copyright infringement is litigated less than one time in a billion, and the vaguely defined, legally vulnerable principle of fair use.

You wouldn't be fined. You'd be arrested and charged criminally, and likely spend the rest of your life in jail. The public does not understand and would happily hang you for being one of those evil hackers. The person who tells them you belong there would be a $1000/hour professional witness.

Infinite-term copyright builds dynasties. They do not take kindly to competition. Stay safe.

How many of us would take the risk of associating with the trillion dollar pirate when the feds make their case? I really hope it’s enough to be a help. Would the ACLU or EFF take the case?

It’s going to be ugly. We’re talking about billions in profits being threatened here with the law on their side. The only defense I’ve heard is with regard to research funded by the US federal government and that’s a long shot argument that applies to a minority of these articles.

In most counties you would not go to prison at all. Even in the US, you wouldn't get more than 10 years max.

Ironic, isn’t it - taxpayers money first goes towards funding a major fraction of the research, and then towards “hanging the evil hackers” to ensure the taxpaying public (the evil hackers included) never accesses what they paid for.

Even 10 years seems to me completely unimaginable for sharing some PDFs

> Copyright law is extraordinarily restrictive, and you, me, and everybody you know is guilty of violation after violation...

That's a pretty extreme claim. Can you give an example of how the average non-bittorrent-using person regularly violates copyright law?

I bet that almost everyone has already copied a friend's drive full of (pirated, old, crappy divx) movies. And doesn't check the copyright for music/pictures they include in material they produce and share (blog, social media, report, art). Academics (even ones not caring about copyright) usually put a lot of their papers on their website even if they handed exclusive rights to some publisher. A lot of amateurs using digital media software use pirate versions they got from some friend on a thumbdrive (photoshop, fl studio, final cut etc). A lot of copyright violations are actually done by people not particularly caring about information sharing just by visiting shady websites (mega and co) or irl friend-of-a-friend propagation. Showing a personal dvd or book scans in a classroom is also a violation. Depending on the terms of service, sharing media subscriptions (newspaper, streaming, tv network) between housholds might be prohibited. Copying cds/dvds from your local library or friends. Reading manga scans. Playing covers at some gig without paying the fees... There's quite a lot of them really! Imho that's showing just how stupid copyright (and patenting) is.

Playing a song for a crowd without the rights is illegal, hence why no major DJ software has a spotify integration

Sometimes what’s legal is incredibly immoral, and what’s moral isn’t legal. “I didnt break any laws” can be a very thin shield to hide behind at times. By the same token, breaking some laws can be the right thing to do, although that won’t necessaril shield you from legal consequences. For concrete examples of legal yet immoral, see Jim Crow, Segregation, slavery, and present day prison work. For illegal yet moral, selling pot to a cancer patient, spreading the sum of human knowledge far and wide, etc.

Legality is not always the only question. Is it a net benefit to humankind? Is it a direct harm to anyone? Is it motivated by greed, or by malice, or by fear, or by altruism?

What is interesting (thus far) to the responses is that no author of a paper has shown up going 'you're stealing my work' - nor is any money gathered by most of these organizations returned to research - myself, I've always envisioned Elsevier as the dutch dude in Austin Powers - One possible cure I heard from a librarian sobbing over the bill was that if there were companies that could hold copyright and companies that could distribute, but no one company could do both there might be some market tension

Definitely not. But you could have some interesting discussions about morality and the legality of hoarding publicly funded scientific results behind paywalls.

There is a very very simple fix for this. Convince the researchers to either self-publish or use a non-paywalled publication/journal.

It’s not that easy unfortunately. Many of the stronger advocates for open access are younger researchers who can’t self-publish as they need to be able to list their peer reviewed publications. Also the choice of journal is often made by more senior academics who don’t always hold the same views. It can also often have associated costs which aren’t small.

I think pre-print servers like arXiv[1] are a good stepping stone to full open access, though even their use can be complicated in some fields.

EDIT: In the UK there are efforts to stop counting closed access publications in various rankings as a result of the Finch report. It’s a new policy change but I already see it having a positive impact.

[1] https://arxiv.org/

I agree with your comment.

your tax dollars paid for the research which was then privately hoarded

Reply on news.ycombinator.com