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Comment by votingprawn | Hacker News Reader

I was a researcher at a reasonably big UK University until about 6 months ago, and I used SciHub fairly regularly.

Sometimes I used it because we didn't have the right subscription for that publisher to get me the journal I needed, but mainly I used SciHub to access papers I already had the "right" to access. The layers of logins screens, buggy single-sign-on systems, having to be in the right IP address range, not being able to download a PDF, meant that I almost always attempted to get the paper through SciHub first, and only went through the library systems when I couldn't find what I needed on SciHub.

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I have had access to pretty much every journal in existence by working at big R1s for some time now. Still I find myself using SciHub on a daily basis when I am not on campus. Much easier to append '.sci-hub.hk' than authenticate (2-factor now), fire up the proxy, etc.

Piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience.

Why is it very hard? Take a look at the most successful platform for games, Steam, to see both things aren't mutually exclusive.

There is a huge difference between Steam and Elsevier and I'm not sure why you feel the one is an example of how the other could evolve. The one sells games for entertainment purposes to the masses, the other sells subscriptions to scientific institutions to give them access to research papers. It's b2c vs b2b and a competitive space versus a captive audience.

I think the parent comment was referring to video game piracy before Steam.

It was a mess of custom launchers, DRM, losing the CD/DVD or key so people would turn to piracy to access stuff they already owned.

Fast-forward a few year and most people are fine with Steam as long as it's the unified launcher for doing thing.

Ok, that's a good point. But video games are rarely created with public funds and in general are not crowdsourced to then be placed behind a paywall. Even Steam has plenty of competition.

If there were a disruption of the world of scientific publishing that would have a parallel in entertainment I would have chosen Spotify over Steam.

Pre-Steam also coincided with pre-Internet / online gaming. Having half your software assets lurking on company servers now makes protecting your IP considerably easier.

I'm only trying to refute the claim that "piracy has one USP that the competition lacks that is very hard for them to replicate: convenience". That's disproven by the fact that many companies e.g. Steam have had undeniable success on the back of that convenience.

I think that claim was made in the context of scientific papers, where there is no counterpart to Steam or Netflix.

That’s the same excuse that’s trotted out in every field with a piracy problem—up until someone finds a way to do it and it turns out it wasn’t an insurmountable problem after all. That’s how we got iTunes, Spotify, Steam, Netflix, and so on.

It's not really an excuse - it truly is convenient in such a way that you only have to go to one place to get the thing you want.

If I want Man in the High Castle, I have to pay for Amazon. But if I want Ozark, I need to pay for Netflix. If I want to watch Metropolis, or The Raven, or The Maltese Falcon, they're old and not any streaming service, even if the rights are owned by a studio. Where can I find them? Yup, bittorrent.

At least piracy more-or-less forced most music to be centralised onto a single service, i.e. in many cases you can get the same songs on Spotify and Apple music. It's a shame piracy didn't force Hollywood studios to sort their out, and allow you to just go to one or two sites. Just look at what Disney are trying to do.

You are of course right: "it wasn’t an insurmountable problem after all" - it's just that studios and publishers squabble. But I'm not holding my breath on Elsevier, MacGrawHill, AddisonWesley, OUP, SUP, etc. to come up with a commerical SciHub.

The selection of movies on Netflix is beyond dismal. If it's not from the last 15 years, your chances of finding it are virtually nil. If it is from the last 15 years, your chances are merely terrible. The demise of video stores has left me with no idea how I'd (legally) watch an old movie short of purchasing the DVD. Strange that widespread access to classic movies only lasted about 20 years -- from the mid '80s to the mid '00s.

That's a false dichotomy that because there was a blockbuster nearby they automatically had every classic movie in stock. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix's total active catalog size is much greater than what was in a blockbuster in 1999

If you are into classic movies I'd imagine that you would still subscribe to the Netflix DVD mail service. Millions of other do. I'd say that is widespread access to old movies, just not widespread interest.

If you must stream (if you are up for physical media, last I checked, Netflix was king, and has am incredibly broad catalogue ) try Amazon Prime.

You have to pay a rental fee of like three or four bucks per, just like blockbuster, but they have a much deeper pool of old movies than Netflix Streaming, I think.

There are a number of alternative streaming services with a better selection. One that comes to mind is Filmstruck, which has the entire Criteron Collection but there was another successful one I can't remember the name of.

The working definition of "excuse" is "a reason I don't agree with".

I think you're agreeing.

That many people stop pirating as soon as something more convenient comes along does not contradict the idea that people used to pirate because it was convenient.

Is BitTorrent more convenient than Netflix?

Depends on what you want to see. If Netflix has it in your country in your language of choice: Netflix wins, else BitTorrent wins.

Torrents are very inconvenient compared to many streaming services.

Therefore, you would expect most people to opt for Netflix. (And by and large I'd expect Netflix to be more popular in mass than tormenting at this point for places where it's available.)

But what if it's not available where you live (That's inconvenient), doesn't have the content you want (That's inconvenient), or you want a file you can play offline that isn't allowed to be downloaded on the Netflix app?

Convenience wins almost every time, but not having the option to do something (be it for lack of $$$ or availability) isn't convenient so that's when more people turn to piracy.

My statement (as can be seen from its GP post) uses convenience to mean ease of use, not in the titles available sense that you (and the two following posts) do.

No but there are piracy streaming apps that are more convenient than netflix.

Far more convenient when you consider that Netflix's catalog of reasonably mainstream as-seen-in-theaters movies has been shrinking for years.

As the end user I don't care "why" their catalog has been shrinking, I only care that something I watched last year and want to watch again is no longer available on that service.

And no, I'm not going to sign up for a dozen different services just on the off chance that one of them will have what I want to see at any given point.

In my experience in the last five years, Netflix's batting average for actually hosting movies I want to see is around 20%. In terms of convenience, if they don't have the movie at all it's kind of like dividing by zero.

No but it is more convenient than lesser known streaming services like popcorn or certain kodi plugins that don't work well.

"Click the picture of Einstein"

Ugh no thanks. Scihub it is.

I've read this many times. It's almost funny

Same exact reasons for me at a big US university.

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