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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Is "public interest" a defence here? As an outlier, let's imagine someone discovers the cure for cancer, and publishes it via Nature. Who then demand a billion for each article viewing.

I can easily see a public interest defence succeeding in this made up case, so where is the line?

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The restriction is on copyright. If a cancer cure is published in Nature then I can take the facts from it and publish it. Copyright does not apply to facts. Others can then use my publication for their own treatments, without access the original paper.

To get to your question of "public interest", one argument for Sci-Hub is precisely that:

> In her defense Alexandra Elbakyan has cited Article 27 (1.) of the UN Declaration of Human Rights "to share in scientific advancement and its benefits",

It's very unlikely that it would work in the US. I think issues related copyright ownership of scientific publications was resolved 40 or so years ago. I vaguely recall it was coupled with changed to the Copyright Act of 1976.

At the very least, that's about the time you start seeing explicit copyright statements appearing in scientific publications.

Too much money on stake. Publishers will surely bribe or apply pressure somehow to the judges, or anyone on their way.

In the real world, the guy discovering the cure for cancer received grants from universities, research institutes, and corporations. Whoever bankrolled the research, those groups own the cure and then can do what they please with it (manufacture it, sell it, give it away...) Nature wouldn't become the sole distributer of that knowledge.

> (manufacture it, sell it, give it away...)

hide it, inflate the value of applying the cure, etc

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