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Comment by kfogel | Hacker News Reader

Is there some sort of announcement from Springer about this? Specifically, one in which they state what the license is, e.g., CC-BY or CC-BY-SA or something like that? I'll bet they attached either the No-Derivs (ND) or Non-Commercial (NC) limitations, though -- would love to be wrong about that. In the PDFs I've looked at so far, they didn't bother to change the copyright statement at the front of the book, so they still all appear to be under traditional restrictive copyright, whatever new terms Springer intends notwithstanding.

-Karl

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From http://www.springeropen.com/books

> SpringerOpen books are published under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) license, so they can be reused and redistributed for non-commercial purposes as long as the original author is attributed.

SpringerOpen is not what's being talking about here. There are only a few dozen books listed in that page. I don't think any of the books being referenced in the comments is there.

That page isn't a complete listing, but you're right, only ~100 of the books seem to be properly open access, unfortunately. I guess Springer can decide to revoke access to the rest at any point in the future.

Edit: looks like they've revoked access already in fact https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10811854

I should have downloaded a few more, in retrospect it's clear it was too good to be true... Especially when no announcement had been made.

yeah, it looks like they are still under traditional copyright. It's just that the purchase price is $0.00. Free as in beer.

Still, that's pretty cool!

Well, right now it's still technically illegal to download them, unless & until Springer actually says some different license. Not that anyone would be prosecuted, obviously; one could clearly claim that it was obvious that Springer intended to distribute them at the very least for personal non-commercial use, even if Springer didn't say so explicitly anywhere. If the terms are even more liberal than that, so much the better... But it ain't so till Springer says it's so :-).

The website says "Open Access: This content is freely available online to anyone, anywhere at any time."

Why is it technically illegal to download them?

The quote says it is legal to download them

--edit: apologies, should be a response to parent

there is somewhat of a difference between "purchasing something for 0.00 with appropriate distribution after creating an account at a webshop" and "torrenting a pdf"

It isn't, assuming Springer doesn't have contracts with author precluding it. Springer is either the copyright holder or is authorised to distribute, and they are explicitly making the works available for download. You don't need any additional permission.

Any license changes they publish are important to establish your right to make any subsequent copies, though.

The site's terms and conditions [1] state:

"You may solely for private, educational, personal, scientific, or research purposes access, browse, view, display, search, download and print the Content."

[1]: http://link.springer.com/termsandconditions

The only issue with that is sites like archive.org might not be able to legally cache and serve these.

Edit: It’s still a Very Good Thing.

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