Sci-Hub and Alexandra Basic Information
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If you send 100 wedding photos to your grandparents without paying photographer for copyright release. That's 100 instances of crime of copyright infringement per work, even if you didn't ask for money (commercial).
In USA, each infringement is $250,000 and/or 5 years jail according to RIAA [1]. With 100, that's $25,000,000 fine and 500 years of jail if USA decides to prosecute you.
Her judgment would make sense.
EFF is a lobby/political group that tackles copyright issues: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/its-copyright-week-201...
You can choose to donate, spread the word, join and contribute, etc.
It's slow but works sometimes. “In 1987, over half[1] Australian households had a VCR, but it only became legal to record TV shows at home in 2006.". IIRC Politicians said their children were criminals for taping their cartoons.
Look into why "plea deals" have exploded in popularity. People get faced with the choice between pleading guilty and getting off with a light(ish) sentence even if they are innocent in reality, or having to face the "full force" of the law which can mean a sentence longer than the live span of whole generations.
The "right to due process and a fair trial" may still be there, but are you free to choose the right to due process and a fair trial if you know you can end up for life?
Yes, he did.
> Under most copyright laws, lets assume worst case scenario for real life example of broken laws.
> If you send 100 wedding photos to your grandparents without paying photographer for copyright release. That's 100 instances of crime of copyright infringement per work, even if you didn't ask for money (commercial)
This is not a crime, it isn't a criminal offence, and so the criminal sanctions do not apply. It's a civil tort. For the criminal sanctions to apply it has to meet the criteria of the crime, and that includes commercial infringement -- in the example you'd have to sell the wedding photos to the guests.
Copyright law is stupid and it needs reform which is why it's important that people don't misrepresent what it actually says.
If you sell the photographs you're now trading and that tips it into a criminal offence.
You'll find that either people are monetizing the distribution; or they're distributing so much content the rights-holders claim it distorted the market.
I'd agree that neither of these should be criminal offences, but neither of them involve "simply receiving a copy".
Sorry, I heard about the case years ago and don't have a link handy. However, that point by itself would be enough to undermine the original claim that only for-profit distribution is considered criminal.
The last part is the one that makes it different in my opinion.
It’s not just people uploading material to share. Seems the platform accesses these systems and downloads from them what’s missing (not sure if metadata or if actual publications).
A Nature article some years ago mentioned she has no assets in the United States. The plaintiffs are therefore unlikely to ever collect any of the $15 million in damages.
I'd love to visit the US sometime, but right now I'd rather not go there for the reasons you mentioned. The only exception would be if my job required it.
I think she lives in Russia now, so no. If not that, it's Kazakhstan, of which I don't know whether it has such a treaty.
In any case, if she is "extraditable", that would still severely limit her travel options, I suppose.
Luckily for her there are no US drone strikes in Kazakhstan...
As others have said, she has truly built a Library of Alexandria.
This article in Science suggests otherwise:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pira...
"Even if arrested, Elbakyan says Sci-Hub will not go dark. She has failsafes to keep it up and running, and user donations now cover the cost of Sci-Hub's servers. She also notes that the entire collection of 50 million papers has been copied by others many times already. "[The papers] do not need to be downloaded again from universities.""
Could you share some examples?
A new paper in my field recently came out regarding how to reduce patient reliance on a particular med, with possibly better results for the patient. The paper had data to back this up.
I couldn’t get it through my institutional subscription. I got it in 5 minutes through sci-hub.
Why a tax-paying patient shouldn’t get up to date care from their tax paying physician through data gathered and analyzed via their tax dollars is baffling.
Well done, Ms. Elbakyan.
Personally, I've used articles obtained through Sci-Hub to guide my approach to managing my own rare health condition. I wouldn't say it saved my life, but I've found the information very useful in figuring out the relative merits of new treatment options.
In particular, there is one specialty journal that's only available by institutional subscription at a cost of more than $2,000 per year. The publisher was particularly unhelpful in trying to find a way to enable access for patients. So despite trying to do the right thing, I just go to Sci-Hub to get this info.
Many of you are aware that Ketamine has been used off-label for rapid treatment of depression and that one of its enantiomers, S-ketamine, has been (I think) approved for clinical treatment of depression.
In these two cases, it was not possible to quickly access either a ketamine formulation or a physician who was familiar with its use.
Google search showed that dextromorphan (yes, the OTC cough suppressant) has similarities to ketamine in its receptor targeting and is being tried in cases of treatment resistant depression. Combined with quinidine (as Neudexta, I think), it is used to treat a condition called pseudo bulbar affect.
All the papers on use of dextromethorphan for depression were paywalled. Thanks to Sci-Hub, I was able to access and annotate 23 papers that together gave enough information (side effects, med interactions, etc.) for the two treating physicians to try dextro with their patients.
Results are N=2, so obviously anecdotal, but both patients experienced recession of suicidal impulses within 48 hours and both continue to show decreasing depressive symptoms.
I believe that neither of them would be with us now but for Ms. Elbakyan's work. I'm deeply grateful for what she's done.
Could be an interesting project to try and make a sci-hub optimized compression system.
Size Range Count
[0, 0.5) 255 (31%)
[0.5, 1) 179 (22%)
[1, 1.5) 108 (13%)
[1.5, 2) 69 (9%)
[2, 3) 80 (10%)
[3, 10) 95 (12%)
> 10 24 (3%)
some journals can weight a lot (scanned pages) even though there's potential to recompress images while keeping it readable
There's also the very bottom file here: http://download.library1.org/dbdumps/
I think your link may point to the LibGen torrents (books, mainly, I believe).
And similarly about Grooveshark.
The truth is that, these types of things always come to an end. It is of utmost importance and urgency for the Sci-hub infrastructure to be made distributed and resilient.
This make me thing, could it be possible to set up a Smart Contract in some blockchain to achieve a similar thing? (I understand that this works by using user/passwords provided by some people, so it may not be feasible given the easiness to look at the information). That way the system will be very resilient given the nature of blockchain.
Nevertheless, I think I give more merit to Library Genesis. Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge.
See this interesting 2004 review by George Danezis: https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/redblue.pdf
That may have been true in the beginning but the blog post says:
"In 2014, I copied articles collected by Libgen to create Sci-Hub's own database. I did not fork Libgen: only the papers PDF files were copied. Then I configured new servers to serve these files to Sci-Hub users.
Today Sci-Hub uses it's own servers to store research papers. However all new articles downloaded by Sci-Hub are mirrored to Library Genesis databases too. Libgen also publishes torrents to download these papers."
I haven't found anything about setting up a mirror. Is there a link somewhere explaining how?
tl;tr/ cannot read Russian
The west treated Alexandra badly. Russia will never give up Alexandra. Alexandra is a true hero. Alexandra, alone, has done more for opening up the science more than all Open Access activists combined.
This is the difference between reformist and revolutionaries.
I have gotten so much utility from it that I have donated a number of times.
Frustratingly there's still certain papers that I've failed to find. Random example: http://jddonline.com/articles/dermatology/S1545961612P0742X/.... I even tried paying for access to this journal and weirdly none of my credit cards worked. So, it's not always even an issue of "oh you're just not willing to spend money".
It is shocking to me how much quality research is gated behind paywalls and thus hardly ever sees the light of day. The scientific ideals (or perhaps enlightenment ideals?) of free distribution of knowledge and community collaboration are completely forgotten. Academic science has been made a complete mockery.
/end rambling semi incoherent rant
Have benefitted immensely from Sci-Hub. I wanna contribute to their cause but currently they only accept bitcoins.
I am from India. Does anyone know how else can I contribute? Online bank transfer is my preferred route. Also, I don’t have an account on PayPal.
If you can find a way to get some euros on my bank or PayPal, I'd be happy to send you coins.
I admit I don’t understand the full technicalities but it’s better to err on the side of caution and stay away from it.
Hence, direct bank online transfer.
Also I assume this would be a small amount, not something that would have a tax impact regardless of whether it's a good or currency.
They have already outlawed bitcoin publicly. That's their official stand.
When Sci-Hub became known, I thought that it will provide a good case against copyright law. When the law prevents science to develop, that law must be repealed.
Nothing of that happened. Instead, Sci-Hub was quickly banished as an ‘illegal’
javascript:window.location='http://sci-hub.tw/'+window.locationWhat really needs to be done is more and more editors and editorial boards of Elsevier-owned journals revolting, as happened with Lingua, the prominent linguistics journal, where the entire editorial board resigned and started the Open Access journal Glossa. (Lingua lingers on as a 'zombie journal', filled with articles of very dubious quality. But everyone in the field knows this.)
Here are links to the major US funding agency's policies.
NIH Public Access Policy: https://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
NSF: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/
DOE: https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/DOE_Publ...
DoD: https://discover.dtic.mil/products-services/
PubMedCentral (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/) hosts full-text for biomedical journals that don't automatically provide un-paywalled access to covered articles, as does DTIC. The one caveat is that there is an optional one year embargo for journals that aren't open access.
You can often find PDFs on researchers' home pages, and preprints are increasingly common too.
Alternatively, there is now a coalition of funders that is taken an even stronger stance: not only must research they fund be published as open access, but the journals they are published in may not hide other research behind paywalls either.
If enforced (big if), this could give an important push to making open access the default, even for places where the government does not demand it that strongly yet. However, it would help to have some more big hitters explicitly sign up, most notably the US.
In case any readers aren't aware, "lingua" is Latin for 'tongue'/'language', while "glossa" (γλῶσσα) is Greek for 'tongue'/'language'. (We also have English words that come from the Attic dialect form "glotta" (γλῶττα); for Ancient Greek dialectal variation between σ and τ, see https://lucianofsamosata.info/TrialInTheCourtOfVowels.html.)
I would assume graduate students around the world pass them to her to use and she just starts up a VPN to imitate the location of the university. That said it's not like these publishers are losing money, universities are still paying for the access like they always were. Plebs such as myself could always get a free copy of some paper by requesting a printout from the campus library just now I do it from my phone instead.
I wonder if this simple statement will change people's views on the project.
Communism as a pure ideology is just as appealing to some as pure Libertarianism is to some others.
Arguably this is better motivation than that of one Kim Dotcom and on par with Aaron Schwartz.
As long as she is not actively involved in politics she is worthy of support.
One of the most effective ways of changing the broken system would be for her to get involved in politics. Yes, she's a communist, the current political spectrum around the world is almost wholly dominated by capitalists, (yes, even in China).
Having a few high-profile communists would certainly do no harm.
I find the whole story deeply fascinating, because it's a rare case when a person of very questionable moral values (I believe most people here would find her behaviour and views reprehensible) does unequivocal good to the society. It's so easy to fall into the trap of black-and-white hero narrative, but sometimes reality is just more gray and weird.
[1]: https://medium.com/@alexandraborissova/sci-hub-banned-in-rus...
What behaviour? Blocking Russian IP's or releasing data to all?
I find the blocking of Russian IP's to be petty, which I believe she backed down from but then had the ISP in Russia start banning the site.
I dont think it raised to "reprehensible"
Now if you mean ignoring Copyright law, and releasing copyrighted works to the world, I do not find that in anyway reprehensible, I am universally anti-copyright and do not believe it should exist at all
Would you like to know more