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Comment by abalaji | Hacker News Reader

As much as the common good benefits from tools like SciHub, I was not expecting there to be any legal footing for this case until the end of the article which mentioned:

> Bapat, of Internet Freedom, says India’s copyright law is more progressive than many developed countries. “By that I mean that there's a research exception provided under the copyright act. It means that if you are using copyright material for research then it would not constitute infringement.”

And sure enough:

> 52. Certain acts not to be infringement of copyright. — [...] (i) private or personal use, including research [1]

I guess this is tangential to "fair use" exceptions under US copyright lawas.

[1] https://copyright.gov.in/Exceptions.aspx

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Not just India, many developing countries didn't follow what European countries tried to enforce through Berne Convention. Thankfully they saw it wasn't on the best interest of economic and social development.

Brazil and other Latin American countries have many provisions protecting freedom for private use, teaching and research purposes.

Imo, the net benefit of copyright and patent law is dubious broadly.

For a developing country signing up to an IP system under which most of the important IP assets are foreign... I find it hard to see an argument.

That’s because you have little experience with how developing countries actually operate.

One common ways developing countries use to build their industrial know how and capacity is to get a foreign company to create a development in it. A factory, manufacturing center, or R&D site. Companies are much more reluctant to do so, if the host country is not willing to protect their IP.

"How did the rich countries really become rich? In this provocative study, Ha-Joon Chang examines the great pressure on developing countries from the developed world to adopt certain 'good policies' and 'good institutions', seen today as necessary for economic development. Adopting a historical approach, Dr Chang finds that the economic evolution of now-developed countries differed dramatically from the procedures that they now recommend to poorer nations. His conclusions are compelling and disturbing: that developed countries are attempting to 'kick away the ladder' with which they have climbed to the top, thereby preventing developing counties from adopting policies and institutions that they themselves have used."

-- Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective

source: https://anthempress.com/kicking-away-the-ladder-pb

This is roughly the thesis of How Asia Works: You need industrial policy. So... yes you do need good institutions (low corruption, etc), but that doesn't mean doing what the World Bank tells you to (what is normally meant by "good institutions").

I was taught the industrial revolution got kicked off in america by samual slater memorizing the design of english textile mills

hollywood was a place for the film industry to build not just for the sunny weather but because they were far away from edison’s patent lawyers

and of course we all know how america handed intellectual property to china without any hope of enforcing IP, they seem to have developed quite rapidly

but i grant you USA and China may be exceptions, but stealing IP looks very profitable to me

More examples here!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28330810

If anyone knows even more, it would be greatly appreciated.

That's how they operate now due to developed nation pressure. They don't want us developing if their companies can't profit from it.

My country once banned imports so that national industry would be forced to develop. The Lua programming language exists because of this policy. Also, plenty of companies would either license or reverse engineer and clone foreign products. Now my country is some kind of globalist hell. It's painful to see in legal doctrine ideas straight out of WHO, IMF, UN, etc.

It's so disgusting it makes me wish China success despite their repressive state. They have an amazing strategy: entice the west to hand over intellectual property on silver platter, develop industry, get rich and then, who knows? We'll have to watch to see what their end game is.

Developing countries are forced to adopt developed nation laws via trade qgreements. It's disgusting.

Here’s the relevant section from the Copyright Act in India:

2[39. Acts not infringing broadcast reproduction right or performer’s right.— No broadcast reproduction right or performer's right shall be deemed to be infringed by— (a) the making of any sound recording or visual recording for the private use of the person making such recording, or solely for purposes of bona fide teaching or research;

What would be the unintended consequences to porting this to the U.S.? As in, legislation that makes bona fide research an explicit fair use case?

I think this might well be a case of: not a lot. This might be a pretty straightforward win:

>What would be the unintended consequences to porting this to the U.S.?

Some Elsevier, Wiley, Springer and ACS lobbyists and counsels would lose their income.

India also has patent law that says you cannot patent life, so Monsanto’s patents aren’t valid in India.

Also Software patents. However, lawyers find an easy way around to somehow word it as innovation rooted in hardware.

Anywhere I can read more about this?

Searching a bit, you might check out Karmarkar's algorithm for solving linear programming problems in polynomial time. Note that it is literally called an "algorithm", and that linear programming problems were taught in my 11th grade math class. Yet it did eventually get patented, after controversy and publicity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karmarkar%27s_algorithm

The patent, linked from above: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4744028

What makes you suggest Karmarkar's algorithm as relevant to Indian patent law? As the Wikipedia article you linked points out, Narendra Karmarkar left India in 1978, getting an M.S. from Caltech in 1979, PhD from Berkeley in 1983, and briefly joining IBM in California as a post-doc (1983) and then AT&T Bell Labs (later in 1983): he came up with Karmarkar's algorithm while at IBM and applied for the patent while at Bell Labs, so everything related to it happened in the US. (The fact that Karmarkar was from India, or that he returned to India in the late 1990s, has no bearing here.)

(Unless your comment was about software patents in general, and not India's patent law specifically.)

Yeah, I was talking about software patents in general, or in the U.S. in particular.

https://www.ipandlegalfilings.com/is-software-patentable-in-...

"In India, the software is not directly patented but it can be granted patent if it is attached with novel hardware, an invention that is unique and capable of industrial use."

So patenting a pure algo or data-structure will face legal hurdles.

This would be an interesting use case for making country specific distro ISOs/variants which don't have the usual patent issues (ala rpmfusion for things like ffmpeg etc.). However, there's no money to be recovered from such an exercise because all the legal analysis is funded by RedHat and there would be little payoff for doing this type of work. So it may not be so straightforward. And RedHat is now owned by IBM, which is synonymous with software patents. So not sure what that implies either.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent

Most countries require some physical component or effect, but the rules are often not easy to be sure of.

There’s also an interesting precedent here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rame...

That's not really a precedent. A shop making photocopies (generally at the request of its customers) is not at all similar to a website.

It is precedent because the judgement states:

> Concerning the argument that there cannot be an intermediary when use of copyrighted material post reproduction takes place in the course of instruction... The argument concerning use of an agency is thus irrelevant.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190530065215/http://lobis.nic....

Thanks for the link. It was an interesting read. Nonetheless, it leans quite heavily on use in the 'course of instruction' which is not the case for sci-hub. The crux of that case seems to be that the University of Delhi had authorised the shop to make the copies, and hence the agency of the shop is rightly moot. AFAIK, no university has endorsed sci-hub (for e.g., by way of posting links to sci-hub on a university or a course page). Should that happen, I guess the ties to this case would be closer.

There is a similar phenomenon in India where international drug patents are largely ignored. Their pharmaceutical market is flooded with cheap generics. It's gotten to the point where the rest of the world just orders their meds online from India.

I'm stating the obvious here: the only people who like copyright laws are the 1% who profit from them. The rest of the 99% get to suffer.

> private or personal use, including research [1]

Doesn't that mean that most forms of piracy should be legal in India? That is, torrenting movies or music, etc.?

No, the exceptions are for fair dealing which is limited in scope.

That sounds like stretching the law a bit too much. :) But, regarding piracy of copyright material, indian courts have said that downloading or streaming a movie from the internet is not a criminal act. It is only the distribution of copyright material that is illegal and a criminal act.

Ofcourse, in this case (SciHub), I am guessing the argument would be that copyrighting research material (science / knowledge) is itself absurd and detrimental to society, and that should trump the interests of the copyright holder.

+1. What if someone claims they are watching movie for purposes of research!

> India’s copyright law is more progressive than many developed countries

In developed countries, each update to copyright makes it more restrictive, not less. So maybe the right word isn't progressive, but regressive.

Yes, because the rich copyright monopolists are all located in developed countries and lobby their governments for laws that benefit them.

I see that the said clause excludes computer programmes. This brings an easy way around. Insert some scripts within the material to be protected. PDFs I believe can contain these.

It is head spinning the the future of the US academic research depends on a renegade student in a adversary country and a foreign copyright law and court system.

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