French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
I would really like to see research which is conducted with the public's money required to be entered into the public domain and currently that doesn't seem to be the case.
The only compensation they're giving anyone is "exposure". Given how little that is worth these days, the validity of the copyright assignments they hold are questionable at best.
The paid journals are an absurdity, but there is only one right course of action: Not using them. Submit no content, pay no subscriptions. Let them whither and die. With more and more universities joining in on open access, this should become easier and easier.
However, they still legally hold the rights to what they have, and thus releasing their content in public is still illegal. You'd have to get the original authors to legally release it elsewhere, which they might not even have the rights to.
Killing them by stealing the content which they legally yet immorally sell and have the rights to is neither just nor impressive, and gives them a chance to cry "Foul!". Do not give them that chance.
They can cry whatever they want. I want them to disappear in great pain!
The real foul is when the government enforces immoral laws.
In this case it is the presence of a legal device allowing to censor copyright-infringing sources which is bad; that is, censorship is not even limited to (very) serious crimes anymore. As a result the government is building the legal and physical infrastructure to manipulate communication via the internet. This will only embolden more authoritarian regimes in their pursuit to isolate and nationalize their internet infrastructure.
Laws only works because everyone follows it most of the time. If everyone is breaking a law, the government can't punish everyone, and eventually people start to wonder why it is a law in the first place.
We've seen this happen with other laws in the past, quite often. Pot legalization comes to mind.
Beside, the majority isn't necessarily in the right either. That's why no matter what you and society need to process the fact that you have broken the law; note that I'm using the abstract term process, which
> Everyone is the magic word here
Unfortunately the "everyone" in this case is just a handful of centralized services - because data-hoarding, like so many other things, becomes vastly cheaper when you do it at scale. It turns out that Sci-Hub and LibGen are not so different from YouTube, FB and other SV unicorns - their vulnerability to legal shenanigans of various sorts is exactly the same!
Not really. People can do what they want. And that includes breaking bad laws, and trying to get away with it.
There is no obligation to "process" this fact, by turning yourself in, for whatever.
A perfectly valid strategy is to instead break bad laws, and try to get away with it. And if enough people do this, then it has an effect, and may eventually cause the law to be changed.
There are old law on the books that no one in their right mind follows today. It's probably one of the ways a law gets repealed eventually - people stop obeying, state stops enforcing, and then perhaps a repeal happens. I don't think this is anything against the legitimacy of law system in general. It's just that it has many ways of working.
Though in this case it's more nuanced, as this is not against the copyright in general, just specific uses.
Then- go to the cops after saving the city\failing to save the city and turn yourself in. Accept the consequence for breaking the law. Civil disobedience embraces this- civil rights activists fighting Jim Crow laws were more than happy to get arrested to highlight the injustice/immorality of the law.
Calling pirating content civil disobedience though is disingenuous in my opinion, especially if you have the means to access it the proper way and are using it to access your career. If you want to 'protest' then download it and then send an email to the FBI that you did so and then publicize it.
Should people be paid for the work they do? Yes. Should people be paid for the work of others? Maybe, if they contributed in some way. Should we pay an academic journal which charges fees for people to submit to them? No, that's absurd.
I don't think that's true if the laws in question are the result of corruption. Rich companies have been paying politicians for some time to keep copyright and patent laws strong in a way that suits their interests instead of the voters'. Resisting laws that came from bribery should be considered a standard part of democracy. Probably even celebrated as virtuous.
Looking at the topic here, I'd say Alexandra is doing something virtuous given corruption and incompetent administrators led to a system where all that research was concentrated in hands of tiny number of greedy players that did about nothing in return.
Most scientists still hold the rights to their articles. You can often e-mail a professor if you need additional information, artifacts or code for reproducibility. Yes, it's hard to get professors to e-mail you back a lot of the times, but when they do, they are often open to giving you copied of their papers and underlying research data. Most journals don't put any restrictions on them for doing so.
In one of my publications, I had to pay an additional $150 just for that article to be open access (and that was over a decade ago. I'm sure it's gone up).
I was a bit careful about stating that its all on the authors, as it is entirely legal for the author to give up their rights to a work (and I wouldn't have been surprised if the journals did that to avoid risk of lost revenue), in which case the hands of the authors' would be bound.
However, do note that from the outside, there's nothing wrong with the ability to create their model. I like that freedom. What is wrong is that we're all feeding it, sponsoring it with government money, and indeed putting what should be our shared knowledge into a private archive.
This is why I believe that the proper way forward is to simply not use them, while allowing their existence. Only if they somehow force their use, or disallow/inconvenience authors' attempts to release their content elsewhere should we take legal action in the form of writing laws against it.
That's a pretty common rule in Schools and Universities, for example.
If you have a fascist firewall, consider using Tor with the FascistFirewall=1 setting (https://2019.www.torproject.org/docs/tor-manual.html.en#Fasc...).
Not trying to be snarky here -- genuinely want to know your perspective. As an outsider, everything I know about it leads me to believe that academia is so competitive that you really can't afford to just "not publish in top journals" and be picky about who you work with/what offers you take.
An academia that cares about journal over quality of work isn't really one I want to be a part of, so either way I'll be happy with the outcome.
Anyway, make your research available, no matter where you choose to publish it. Take a look at DORA http://www.ascb.org/dora/ and popularize this declaration among other researchers. Help your colleagues who don't know how to find an article fast.
They're not going to fix the problem alone, and if they want to switch universities later they'll probably take a career hit in impact factor. But that's still very different from the postdoc/adjunct/non-tenure-track case where people who buck the system don't get positions, and so no one can sustainably push back.
Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.
This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours worth of work by people who simply love music and wanted to share that love with other enthusiasts, creating some of the richest catalogues of music and music metadata the world has ever seen. And then it all was destroyed.
And this was true for many other topics of interest too.
We have burned many digital libraries in the last few decades, and we will probably continue to do so for a while longer.
I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.
Reveal how inventions and large companies work, as opposed to the old cloak-and-dagger method of 'secret formulas' and such. Then allowing anybody to see the method and licence it from the company, or be liable for a lawsuit.
What we used to have is if somebody somehow stole the secret to an invention it became fair game. Nowadays though companies try to game the system by having intentionally labrinthian patchworks of patents that do their best to not reveal anything about how the invention works while still being able to be used to sue people.
Rightly so-- and nothing of value would be lost. SV companies don't have much in the way of "secret sauce", they just have $$$ to burn (from VC weenies buying equity stakes) for hosting costs and for developing increasingly-crappy web frontends.
A lot of it was about album collecting which frankly is not working the same anymore
Personally I am sad iOS poorly supports listening mixes plus Soundcloud slowly destroying itself...
This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.
The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
Edit: Wait. Am I part of the problem?
If you want more, look either of them up.
Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available.
I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.
It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable.
Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.
Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.
Eh, I feel like we've almost fully gotten away from bit-rot. Bit-rot was a problem because individuals don't bother to go to the effort of constant IT administration, and don't have the economies of scale required to afford good data redundancy.
But individuals don't have to back things up "personally" any more. With one command, I can send three copies of any file to three object-storage providers. Each one (according to the Dynamo architecture, which they mostly all implement) is holding 17 copies of the data on 17 shards, and replaces copies from the good ones whenever they go bad. Each provider's copies only exist in one region, but the region is different for each provider selected. As individual object-storage providers die, I can find new ones and sync my data over from the surviving ones. As long as "cloud [redundant] object storage" as a concept exists, I won't have to do much at all to ensure continued integrity of my data. All the details—including porting my data to new physical substrates when old formats die—are being handled under the abstraction, and converted into (tiny!) monthly fees that are lower than what even a zero-redundancy tape library would cost me.
And, of course, the data I'm sending is encrypted, and not even with a symmetric key, but rather a PKI key where the decryption half of the key is held in cold storage (i.e. in hardcopy base64 in a safety deposit box at a bank; and a few other places.) If I'm uploading rips of something copyrighted, nobody will ever know that but me. I'll be able to get the data back out when the time comes to dust it off and share it.
Yes, I just noticed I accidentally dropped the "of thousands" part while writing my comments.
Back then, they were just servers you downloaded stuff from.
Edit: it shut down in 2001, and everyone I knew at the time was using it. vanderZwan might have misused the word torrent, but the rest of his post is spot on.
It was a gaming historian's wet dream. They were even beginning to record the releases from different warez scene groups.
But everything went away because, form what I gathered, someone in EA noticed you could download FIFA 96 for the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the site. RIP
People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.
I sure hope the community can be revived.
There's a lot more bandwidth and cheap storage today than 10 years ago. I'd love to be able to contribute and share to it.
I so dearly hope this is true for other sites like What.CD
The FIFA games usually have licenses to use the teams and player names. and lots of licensed music.
We still have communities like that, but you need the right connections to get in.
The EU just passed the directive for the new copyright package which further cements the status quo (the two often mentioned articles are just the worst of it), so don't expect any progress if people don't start to elect more progressive politicians.
The projections for the EU election show that the shares of the fractions won't change much, beside a slight shift to the right. The composition of the Conservative wing, however, will become more Euroskeptic and nationalistic.
And from an economic perspective, I don't see any big shift towards more consumer-oriented party programs, while the right-wing generally tends to be liberal(classical), or neoliberal even, anyway.
P.S.: To avoid DNS blocking, use a DNS server from a private party; and since in some countries such data streams are manipulated, use encrypted DNS to ensure integrity. https://dnscrypt.info/faq
There is a difference between "left-wing" as in economic AND social leftism vs the sort of neoliberal, "Third Way" politics, which equal socially left-wing, but economically center-right.
Most of the "social democratic" parties in Europe are that way these days. They don't really champion economic populism, wealth redistribution etc.
And IMO there are no (neo)liberals in Spain, if you listen to facts instead of words.
Every party currently in Parliament is big-state. PP raised taxes over Zapatero levels and public expenses even more, systematically breaking expense limits every single year they were in government.
They're pro choice, pro LGBTQ etc. but also very much pro things like privatization.
As for "Is that something that doesn't cost money?" - that's a childish question that is almost not worth answering. Maintaining a functioning society always costs money, there's infrastructure & services to maintain.
Taxes are going to get collected, so for me the only real question is if they're going to be spent on moving the country forward, supporting those in need of support and improving services, (healthcare etc.) & infrastructure, (bridges, roads...), making sure publicly funded research stays public, going after corporate tax evasion and so on... or if they're going to be spent on bloated military contracts etc.
Sadly, the supposed left-wing in most of Europe today is not focusing on healthcare, infrastructure etc. in a major way and thus the distinction between them and the right seems rather thin. They're both fairly pro-corporate, thus the main distinction is the social politics, which rarely address people's economic concerns.
As for big state, I don't know, Mariano Rajoy, a right-winger was willing to send "the State" to violently suppress an independence referendum. Not sure how that squares with you.
Wow, thank you. That actually saves me time. Once somebody answers like that, it's clear that any effort to reason would be a waste.
Progressive = Left = Good
Right = Bad
I don't believe that the access to what public funding pays (public research) is intrinsically linked to the left, quite the opposite.
In the past for example while the US published a lot of information in public journals, Soviet Russia was very secretive about theirs(while benefiting from the West). US was not leftist than Soviet Russia.
While the left wants to link themselves to the idea of "progress", hence the auto denominated name "progressive", I don't see the progress anywhere after watching the process take action in Europe multiple times(North Americans have not experienced real left in power), quite the opposite.
The left wants to create a monster State. Once in place individuals have no power at all. Everything is controlled top down and as there is only one entity, there is no competition.
There is way more risk of "regulatory capture" when there is only one entity than when competition exist. Journals ownership of what public funding pays is a case of regulatory capture.
Scientists should demand their work to be in the open, or it will not really be science.
You started by criticizing a simplistic analysis of Left == good, Right == bad, but you just flipped Right == good, Left == bad and offered such a juvenile, simplistic analysis, it's honestly laughable.
When it comes to the left, you'd have to distinguish between neoliberals, (socially left, economically centre-right), which is who's been in power in Europe when it comes to the left. You fail to realize that there is a thing called "left-wing libertarianism", in fact libertarianism originated with the left and most people, apart from Americans, understood libertarianism to be left-wing.
There's no "monster State" advocated there. It's more about ensuring equality of opportunity, (not outcome(!)), promoting cooperatives etc. In reality, these would be beneficial for competition, because it promotes more people being able to take the risk of having a business, since there's a social safety net.
Neither brightest human achievements nor genocide happen only under a single political orientation flag.
There are people that are admirably altruist and awesomely creative regardless of the main political forces going on where they live. And there are people seeking to concentrate always more power for themselves regardless of socioeconomic consequences for others under any flag of the day which would serve this purpose.
>Opposition in the European Parliament is led by populist parties including Poland's ruling Law and Justice party, Italy's ruling Five Star Movement/Lega Nord coalition, and the UK Independence Party. Other opponents include a large number of smaller parties at either end of the political spectrum.[66][72] Notable among these is the Pirate Party Germany, whose sole MEP Julia Reda has been an outspoken opponent of the proposal.[73]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
I did not orientate my statement based on party names and official affiliations, but the overall political and economical nature and priorities of the copyright directive and actual policies the EP fractions vote for.
Yesterday there weren't any, let alone good, alternatives. Even today with good alternatives, the way publishing in "high impact" journals is tied to pay can make the issue not really have other options.
Free access to knowledge is fairly foundational to science and something that's has been talked about for a while. This isn't a new problem. It comes as a surprise to no one.
This is doubly true given the amount of government money spent on this research that is then being kept from the public.
The scientists are often paid be the government. So it is the government that creates this situation and makes "high impact" journals what they are. It is the government that doesn't mandate free access to the knowledge.
I agree, however, that receiving government funding should require open access publishing.
My case, by the way.
Just until the people with guns come.
Donating to Sci-Hub today.
So a DNS level block... This should help to educate some French users on what a DNS is, and steer some of them away from using their ISP provided DNS servers.
I even get better access (but my ISP is often shitty). I woould not have tried Tor, but for this block.
Much more convenient than the web interface, if you ask me. And without the problem of remembering the right URL.
that would be the end result, put the onus on the DNS providers. who needs to China to disrupt the net when the West is just fine doing it on its own.
we are literally at the point where European citizens need to engage in doublespeak on certain topics for the fear of harassment from people abusing the legal system, and it's getting words faster by the day
Any filtering gets to happen inbound to that country unless you want to only view content that is legal in turkey, Israel, Pakistan,Uzbekistan, south africa, Russia, the US and insert another 60 names here.
We already have a way to handle different DNS results for different sub sections of the populace. They can run their own DNS servers and mandate that their users use them blocking alternatives if they so desire.
I would be surprised if Optus actually managed to do SNI filtering for the entire country without screwing it up.
Edit: Huh, seems like they do have a dedicated IP. At least both Robtex and Securitytrails report them as the only tenant on their IP. But you can /etc/hosts 4chan.org to a different Cloudflare IP, and CF will still SNI-route it to the real site. That would defeat any IP address-based block.
I have also written how the site can try to bypass the blocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19552689
Thanks to the lack of user accounts needed to use the site, pretty much everyone checks their social filter at the door, and it's earned some unfavorable comparisons. Given its reputation I'm not surprised to hear it's the subject of censorship.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/australian-med...
Outreach from social workers and societal safety net is the best way to prevent radicalization. I see legalization of drugs as an example.
If I was to commit some atrocities tomorrow and write a pamphlet outlining my motive and calling for others to do the same thing while adding a note saying "look, they'll try to censor this!" will you, out of principle, argue that my manifesto shouldn't be censured because that's what I would've wanted? If so, why?
In my opinion his main objective was to get attention and put his nauseous ideology in the spotlight. I don't know if banning it is the right solution but frankly I won't waste my time playing devil's advocate for a mass murderer.
"First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Hopefully society will not do that.
The content might be repulsive but we are better off knowing how they think than allowing only them to know the contents.
Crazy manifestos are probably just like weapons in this regard, ordinary people won't care to get one if they are illegal, bad guys will.
As a kid I got a good explanation of how badly certain ideologies failed even if they looked reasonable.
I also got an intro to safe handling of guns, especially the part about never ever pointing a gun at anyone, loaded or not, except in wartime. I was quite young then but it sticks, like a whole lot of other stuff from my childhood.
I'll try to give that to the next generation together, together with an explanation of how insanely stupid such manifestos are - and a crash course in unarmed fighting (disable or confuse opponent, get away).
Young people should know what exists or it will take them by surprise.
> "First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Definitions of "terrorist" differs and while I and you can agree on this and many others I really really don't want to have more power than necessary in the hands of any government.
Read history and you'll see that most cruelties in the last few hundred years were commited by states against their own citizens, not by random blokes with weapons.
Speaking as a us citizen, that is crazy talk. Why should the government be let to decide what is "too dangerous" for me to read? It seems incredible that first world democracies still engage in that kind of censorship.
Another instance, I think fox and Breitbart are scourges for their disinformation campaign (not that they're "conservative" or have an "agenda", the wsj is also conservative and has an agenda), but making them illegal is a line too far. It provides too much power to a government who already has too much.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl...
Obviously the risk is not that reasonably educated HN readers could stumble upon this manifesto and start a massacre, the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people. People become radicalized on the web, actually the shooter himself kept spouting "memes" straight from /pol/ and other alt-right websites. Similarly many Islamist terrorists who carried attacks in recent years also radicalized online, feeding on propaganda websites and fake news.
Does banning 4chan or the manifesto achieve anything? I'm not sure. But dismissing any attempt to curb this very real problem as "crazy talk" is not really constructive criticism.
You can literally make the same argument against fox or Breitbart. Or cnn, nyt, wapo as the president continuously tries to. He should remind you why the government should have limited powers.
And yes, the general fear of sex and sexual is maddening and counter productive.
I guess it makes sense if you're a libertarian/anarchist or something in this vicinity but if that's the case this discussion has been rehashed millions of times before and I don't think we'll find a common ground here.
But this seems to clearly intensify. We now have laws passed "to regulate things against Fake News during election period"[1], in a climate of already large distrust of population against politics.
It's really unclear how this plain censorship is not replaced with a mandatory warning, which would give the opportunity to let people judge by themselves (or at least decide to trust the authority that the material doesn't worth their attention).
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_France/Fausse...
My VPN was blocked recently and I had to go to my network provider with my ID to prove my age(?!) so I could access my VPN again. I was not impressed.
Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.
Interesting times.
It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.
Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.
They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.
Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.
Try doing that today with 5 people all trying to watch Netflix. That wasn't a thing back in 2002.
In 2002, I had 1mbit.
Apart from their mobile offering - plenty of bad things to say about that!
They fix stuff quickly too, I'd recommend em.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.
In Germany she is heavily mocked for not understanding the Internet. Of course, it's the bright populace of high class forums such as Facebook and r/de who know better than the Physicist Chancellor of a G7 nation...
In reality, she meant it is legal Neuland. That authorities and courts had little established ways of enforcing laws online, that even heavily illegal acts were difficult to process and prosecute.
Now we are getting there. The law catches up with the Internet. If we want a free Sci-Hub and free content sharing, then it's the law that we have to adapt. Because governments already adapt their procedures - the online Wild West is over.
Kind of feels like "civilization" creeping into the Old West.
I for one have no faith in educating the government as long as companies with multi-million-dollar lobbying budgets are free to sway politicians to legislate in their favor. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though.
the only long term solution is to change the laws, not to work around them, but we don't have the economic power to balance the lobbies anymore.
What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
This would break phone usage.
The same apply to internet, except that it can do even more. The only ways to make sure theses criminal activities doesn't happen would be to limit how it can be used which break everything.
Somewhere out there someone read this and thought "wow that's a great idea"
That sounds like DPI and rewriting upstream DNS responses is not excluded though. If that gets implemented, it doesn't matter which server you choose.
And changing the DNS under my Ubuntu box was far from trivial. It is only possible to change the secondary DNS in the connection UI. I had to use a reduced version of DHCP (IP address only) and change /etc/resolv.conf.
Went to libgen instead, will never buy a book on GooglePlay again.
This age of electronics and logic and AI should have been able to provide a reasonable benefit to consumers at the very bottom. Instead, corporations have found new ways to rig things, impersonate people, and generally be dishonest about the quality and effectiveness of their offerings.
google-chrome != browser
grrrrr
Thanks Elsevier & Springer!
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...
After all, that's what I would expect should happen to a regular thief.
Do you also expect that industrial executives, managers, and everyone down to the line workers get booked on terrorism charges, for poisoning our water supplies, if they are caught illegally polluting?
Not the original poster, but Yes, of course. Who doesn't expect that?
People who have any experience with how the real world works.
At best, the company may get a token fine, with the people giving the orders, and carrying them out never getting held accountable.
At worst, much hooing and hawwing is had about how important <the industry> is, and how <the company> pinky swears that it will never do what they did again.
Torture at its best.
Then again, when it’s not enforced and when you know how violent union people can be, you don’t know how long you’ll stay there, and if you will get out alive at all. You only know when it’s over.
What I’m furious about is that the signature should have been considered under duress. It was not.
That's what the victim party had asked for too, so I don't understand what problem there is with this judgment?
So I'd argue that the French have a love-affair with traditional publishing, and traditional publishing loves draconian copyright rules.
The whole thing is almost a culture war for the French people's soul by-proxy.
In this case I have no pity for them, then. If they want to feel better about themselves by cutting off their own ears because other people are using English then let them.
Now please don't consider this ruling as one made by the actual researchers, especially the younger ones that had a decent English education and sees no problem using English material.
This sentence is ridiculous and has nothing to do with scihub and libgen. Most french researchers are perfectly happy using these sites, and dislike strongly the draconian schemes of scientific journal publishers (which publish texts mostly in english). Several people are pushing for french university libraries to stop paying subscriptions to journals and give all that money directly to scihub. Yet, these initiatives are always blocked at higher levels.
I think this has more to do with the copyright lobby than anything else.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/visuel/2016/05/10/edition-sc... (in french)
[2] https://www.the-scientist.com/daily-news/french-universities...
But everything to do with the French government's attitude towards traditional publishers and why they work so closely together. This issue doesn't begin and end with research publishing, it is bigger and older than that.
Calling something "ridiculous" simply because you want a black & white answer to a larger complex cultural phenomenon is a little disappointing.
Well, someone has to.
Without strong copyrights we would have nothing to trade.
Publishers used the existing laws to get this ban, as they already did in other countries. I wouldn't be surprised they've started some similar actions in other countries and will end up with similar results.
Honestly, almost every country has copyright laws, so allow this kind of lawsuit.
Though I would agree that the comparison is weak. While I'm always against censorship in all its forms, relating it to China seems... stretched.
Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible.
> the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.
Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be irrational and pass arbitrary laws for longer than you can stay sane, and dictatorship is, well, dictatorship.
The US constitution and the bill of rights are explicitly based on the idea of natural law.
As homo sapiens sapiens is a social animal, it's difficult to make the distinction between what it "natural aspirations" and "social consensus".
In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.
You mean FOSTA/SESTA?
Authoritarian is the word, I believe. Thing is, along with that, there is this dangerous corporations embracing over own citizens. A weird and toxic relationship.
However, there is subtle, but important (at least to me) distinction between “this site violates the law — let’s pursuit its owners legally” and “this site violates the law — let’s block it for everyone and censor communications to implement that”.
You still need VPN if you want to get to some content forbidden for political reasons, but for most people the ability to get a movie/album/book they want matters more.
Here in Switzerland, obtaining copyrighted content for own use is basically decriminalized (its illegal distribution, however, is not).
Sadly, the current idiots in power think following the diktats of any and every passing foreign bureaucrat is an order from the Devas themselves. I don't think anyone who'll be coming in May will be any good either (if not worse).
Sci-hub and LibGen are services that those of us outside a university or at something besides rich research universities depend on more.
Just speculation, but maybe this is a pre-emptive strike? Probably the courts would be less inclined to support the publishers if they sued to block these services only after they entered into conflict (with the universities)?
(I have never heard anyone in research who thinks that pay walled journals is a good thing.)
- Search for an article on PubMed in the university library portal
- Get a list of results
- Download the article as pdf from the publishers website
Additionally many journals are accessible just by navigating to the publishers website (science, nature, physics journals, ieee journals) depending on which university vpn you are logged into. This covers most use cases, I am sorry to hear it’s not the same in France.
There are several issues that make blocking a website ineffective:
- if you intercept and replace DNS responses for these sites then users with DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TCP will bypass the block. So let's promote using DoH/DoT and enabling it by default instead of relying on ISP's DNS servers.
- if you examine the domain name in SSL Server Hello message then the site can switch to TLS 1.3 where it is encrypted.
- if you resolve domain names and block access to those IPs automatically without human review then the owner of the blocked site can block any other site by adding its IP address to their DNS server. This can be funny, and we had such cases in Russia.
- if you resolve domain names not very often, for example once every day, then the owner of the site can avoid blocking by regularly changing IP address.
Let me give a hint to French court: ordering the search engines and advertisement companies to stop dealing with the site is much more effective.
LibGen on the other hand I'm fascinated by. Most people I meet have absolutely no idea that a vast proportion of all commercially-produced (more or less technical) books are available for convenient free download. And while I would love for that human knowledge to be freely available to everyone on the planet, we do have to concede that many of those books were written by authors on the understanding that it was a commercial project and they would receive income for it.
Do people generally agree with the above distinction? I feel that this thread (and perhaps the French government / courts) should be making it more clearly.
I'm no expert on this and the ways of achieving it, but as a citizen I feel more and more concerned about this - in particular as my (French) government seems eager to move in the not-right direction.
On the other hand, I understand disagreements with the law exist, but that's a normal thing and we (in France) are still able to vote for some parties with different point of view on copyright, so I'm not sure why some people are speaking of "authoritarian" or "censorship"
On a brighter note: cosmic rays are coming at you; and Elsevier and Springer are making bank.
zer0nets youtube pedant solves this by creating a site for each "channel" und just aggregating them
I'm not aware of any block that is effective against TOR. Even if that were possible, I bet sci-hub has a .onion mirror, which is by definition not blockable.
I'm not a scientist myself, and would be happy to hear anyone else's opinion, but alternatives like peercommunityin.org look more promising.
All in all, this ban can be easily be circumvented (it's just a DNS block), so I'm not really sure it will help editors. It may cause an opposite effect, helping people to move to different solutions. But maybe I'm over optimistic.
$ nslookup http://sci-hub.tw/
Server: 127.0.0.53
Address: 127.0.0.53#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: http://sci-hub.tw/
Address: 36.37.242.94
It is trivial for the user to appoint another DNS server, or even to add the site to his /etc/hosts file manually, if they try to block at that level. It is also trivial to tunnel over another ip address to reach the one wanted. How is "blocking" supposed to work?
In the court document, they asked for an injunction against a list of domain names. Therefore, I assume the "block" will be limited to blocking them at the DNS level.
"Toutes mesures propres à empêcher l'accès" ("All appropriate measures to prevent access"), means everything and nothing, especially, when it is most likely impossible to do. What they really want is to block particular content. In my opinion, it is not possible for an ISP to support that.
That might be an easier solution than trying to achieve minimally sane copyright reform.
Could you not simply hash the content of libgen to find said key?
For something of the size of half life 3 (about 2GB? no idea), the number of collissions would be far more than the number of atoms in the universe.
Almost a "Graham's number" level of understatement.
Imagine something like finding the seed for a pseudorandom number generator where the numbers generated form the byte pattern for libgen.
That's similar to the cryptominer hashing where people just have rigs enumerating through possible values to generate a hash with the appropriate number of leading zeros. It's just that libgen would be little bit longer than a hash and also have some ones interspersed with the zeros.
There is no way of traversing hash collisions. It would be the hash of some string of cryptocurrency jarble that also happens to be the hash of some encoding of the libgen database and you would have no way of knowing this unless you specifically hashed all of libgen. In this case you know all of libgen already anyway, unless you forgot the information that you hashed.