In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015)
custodians.onlineEach time this subject comes up I feel moved to repost this article [1]. The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry". Brutal, radical reform is now necessary.
[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio... (turn off js to view)
Alternative archive.ph link for people having trouble to disable Javascript (e.g. on mobile):
Poetic.
Or just pragmatic?
> Then came the Covid pandemic and “climate emergency”. What had been a friendly, ideological tussle about the digital rights of scientists versus profiteers took on a new tone. To call it “civil disobedience” would be to miss the point. Universities simply stopped playing the game – and the more progressive governments followed suit by deeming the enforcement of academic publishers’ copyright no longer in the public interest.
So, this didn't happen - and IIANM, there wasn't even a copyright/patent moratorium on vaccine-related IP, right? I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?
Companies like Moderna did dispense with IP restrictions around the vaccine, but it turns out that this was never a binding constraint in the first place. These vaccines must essentially be brewed via a biological process, not merely synthesized in a chemical lab like most pharmaceuticals. There's probably a whole lot of fuzzy know-how in this that's inherently hard to replicate, no matter what the legal environment is like.
I don’t think anything happened at a governmental level, but I know some companies open sourced select patents to help with the pandemic. I vaguely remember an issue with 3D printing ventilator parts because it violated the patent [1], but I don’t think that company ever actually sued anyone, they just threatened it.
1. https://www.techtimes.com/amp/articles/248121/20200317/maker...
Reminds me of very small integrated circuit process nodes where the manufacturing process itself is so rife with trade secrets and "art not science" that it's hard to duplicate even without IP restrictions.
Aren't mRNA vaccines quite straightforward to manufacture?
They are incredibly hard to manufacture. They are just all manufacture the same way with the same equipment, so if you can do one, you can do any.
> I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?
Bill Gates convinced them not to free up the IP. No joke.
Well of course, biocompatible 5G chips are no joke! They'd be crazy to give that kind of IP away.
> The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the "publishing industry".
That's quite an understatement.
Remarkably, it once was.
Cheap duplication of written data, conveying knowledge from one brain to another without requiring tedious manual transcription or oral explanation to each learner, started with the printing press in the 1400s and broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education, bringing book learning and literacy out of scarcity to the masses.
Even into the mid-20th century, academic publishing was primarily on paper and relied on expensive offset printing that only makes economic sense when printing runs of many thousands of copies, requiring a publishing industry to produce these documents.
Now, though, that "digital publishing" is available, this problem of scarcity no longer exists. The publishing industry requires scarcity to make their contribution valuable, and they can only create that scarcity artificially.
This google search[0] will provide a list of interesting papers about piracy.
They seem generally to support what I think is something like the majority consensus here:
- piracy does some harm to sales, especially of new books, but can increase consumer knowledge and therefor increase diversity of sales and sales of older works: "effect of piracy is heterogeneous: piracy decreased the legitimate sales of ongoing comics, whereas increased the legitimate sales of completed comics. The latter result is interpreted as follows: piracy reminds consumers of past comics and stimulates sales in that market." [1]
- piracy does considerable harm to large institutes (but largely seen as a good thing)
- for sales, a lot of the lost revenue seems to be made up for "increases the demand for complements to protected works, raising, for instance, the demand for concerts and concert prices"
- that DRM creates fake scarcity where none should exist-- distribution costs are now zero, we shouldn't pretend that we still need to pay so much for books and music
- how to make sure artists still have a revenue stream needed to exist is definitely still a problem, but it is not one that is solved by crushing pirate libraries
Also further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33460970 (517 comments, recent)
And, to the person down below who wants to help out, check out the further discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=annas-blog.org (>1000 comments over six submissions)
[0]: https://www.google.com/search?q=site:gwern.net+piracy
[1]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2019-tanaka.p...
[2]: https://www.gwern.net/docs/economics/copyright/2010-oberholz...
EDIT: formatting
This seems to imply that you could get most of the socially-desirable effects of piracy simply by instituting compulsory royalties for previously-published works that have since fallen out of print. As of today, most out of print works will simply never get republished and users who want to access them legally have to resort to substandard solutions such as the used market, or merely borrowing a legitimate copy of the work. (Until the work falls out of copyright protection altogether, and then it's fair game for free reproduction by anyone.) Fix this in a comprehensive way and you would create a lot of value.
Note that this was essentially Google Books' proposal, before they got forced into only showing tiny snippets of works to avoid copyright issues; it's not a new idea at all.
i will try to explain my stand. 2005-12. a small "user" from india HAD 0 means to purchase online content. local content in the stores was the same expensive "imported" stuff and TV was the only main means of consuming content. then with internet, i could suddenly go to piratebay and watch any movie or read any book or download any game. talking about "buying using paypal and stuff", INDIANS STILL CANNOT EASILY BUY FROM INTERNATIONAL SELLERS, you need a "credit card, then you need to call your bank to allow international transaction and then it fails most of the time". this problem exists in 2022, forget about 10 years ago.
to put that into perspective, https://nextbigwhat.com/indias-credit-card-industry-key-stat...
says "A thread While at 925mn debit cards are highly penetrated, credit cards is still a nascent industry ~ 50mn card base (3.5% per capita, unique cards ~60% of this" so only 2.1 mil card holders in india who can potentially buy from foreign markets online.
that said, if i consume content here in india, "HOW AM I CAUSING SALES LOSS TO POOR RIAA and americaan authors and all the content creators?". this is same for 15 years ago and today. a lot of stuff doesnt exist in india in the official market so yeah.
this goes for MOST OF THE WORLD, pricing has helped because for a long time, amazon prime is being sold in india for inr 1500/year or US $17. while in the US the same costs $14.99/month (plus tax). same for netflix and stuff. they made india specific pricing and people are adopting them but it is basically impossible for me at least to pay $14.99/month (plus tax) if amazon prime did not exist in india and i had to pay for american prime.
this is the same problem with scientific journals for example. $35 is normally put as a price but that amount is A LOT in indian rupees and the same for rest of the world who are not on american living standard and cannot pay american prices.
i get it, the moral argument of "you dont pay, you dont get access to our content for which i own the copyright for" but also "doesnt matter if you own the rights or not, i was never going to pay or even if i was, i couldnt pay legally so it doesnt matter because i havent cost you anything financially".
there is a case against DRM, if you pay, you get more restrictions than if you dont so whats the point?
It's basically "You didn't lose money because I pirated your product, I had no money to begin with".
I can relate to this, coming from a poor background. I would've never be where I stand today If I didn't have access to the published material on the internet for free.
Also, the prices of scientific papers are atrocious! And that's not even considering the fact that the researchers who wrote the paper and peer reviewed it for free won't receive a penny!
What do you expect from me when even Harvard says It's expensive?
See also: game piracy. People who install cracked games are mostly kids, or people who can't afford the game. GabeN was right, piracy is a service problem. Any additional piracy after you solved the service problem was never going to be sales anyway, and now you're just spending money to prevent people from playing your game.
Of course, some percentage of pirates become sales conversions, as well. I’ve bought plenty of movies and music after pirating it. I know many people like this. True that this is the exception, not the rule, but then we’re back to the “I am only consuming this because it’s free” issue.
yes. game piracy is huge and STEAM is even bigger. for once, people ACTIVELY use steam because of the multi-player community which is absent in pirated content. sure you can pirate a game and play offline but do you want to? so even pirates pay for that which makes gabeN the one person who ACTUALLY understands the whole thing...
This is broadly correct of course. Modern IPR's have been explicitly pushed since the 1990s or so as a neo-colonialist racket; force dirt-poor people in other parts of the world to pay for the West's tech and content, and rake in the billions. Needless to say it doesn't work like that and can never work like that.
yes, and as i said, the pricing is always made with american rates in mind, sure $100 looks good for a software/ music cd or a movie, whatever but poor people from poor countries cannot afford it in the first place. ebooks are especially stupid in this regard. we are told "this book costs $20 to write, edit, print, sell, transport, wastage and all that" but when it comes to ebooks, prices are equal or more so what happened? i was told back when that a textbook author gets no more than 5% of the sticker price royalty. rest is in transportation and seller margins and stuff. i've always said "here, 5% of $20 is $1. how about the author gets $2 or 3, that is the extent of my "moral obligation" and everyone is happy but no. "
A nit, the argument with be easier to read without the all caps in certain places. That's just personal preference though...
That's interesting. You could make Copyright closer to the way Patents already work: you get protection for your work, but only for as long as you're making it available to the public; once you stop licensing your protected work, you lose the protection.
So if you publish a work and later stop making that work available, it would automatically lose protection and it would become legal to share online or for another company to print.
Yes, that's one possible solution to the issue of out-of-print works. Compulsory licensing or royalty payments for these works could provide a way for them to be republished and made available to the public again. This would create value by ensuring that these works remain accessible, and by providing a financial incentive for publishers to republish them.
> piracy does considerable harm to large institutes
What do you mean by the word "institutes" here? First thing that comes to mind is academic and research institutes, but surely piracy doesn't harm them. So you must mean something else?
Elsevier basically. They are always everyones bogieman. Predatory publishing houses.
But yeah academics love piracy;)
For those who enjoyed this thorough summation of the state of the art, you may find the following forum interesting: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/1597/is-it-im...
It’s a well organized discussion of the philosophical viewpoints surrounding piracy. I felt a compulsion to share based on the parent’s use of “where none should exist” (which borders on opinion).
Related: Scihub's hearing before the Indian courts apparently has been moved back to Feb 2023 if I read the first comment correctly at the Reddit thread that is keeping track of the case [0]. The High Court website is non-reachable for me so I cannot confirm.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...
Edit: Confirmed as URL [1] finally worked.
[1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/court/dhc_case_status_list_new...
they've been doing this for more than a year iirc, a lot of people say it's going to be years before its day in court happens only to be delayed again when it finally happens
i don't honestly know why she's putting up with cutting out adding new papers for this when it was perfectly accessible before. it makes me sad but i hope something good eventually comes from it
Back when I was doing my undergrad in India, I was doing an internship in a lab there. It wasn’t a national lab, so calling that lab dirt poor is an understatement (they used to wash and reuse microfuge tubes). They would typically work with a budget that’s 1/100th of a regular American lab.
Naturally their research was also for the most part mediocre or worse. Except one paper that got published in a British journal in the early 00s.
I had the privilege of working with the first author of that paper and asked him how he used to get the papers to read back in the nineties when internet wasn’t a thing in India. Be warned that this university’s library didn’t even have Nature or Science.
His answer was, if there’s a paper they’d want to read, if it’s at least in a fairly prominent journal, they’d money order 15 rupees to the Indian institute of immunology in New Delhi with an ILL request and hope they respond. If they’re lucky they’d get a copy of the article in a few months.
They still did great research for what they were able to afford or read. Great research has always been done when access to articles wasn’t a given. It would be weird to assume that free unfettered access has anything to do with the spread of or lack thereof good scientific knowledge and research.
This is not even conjecture. We’ve already witnessed the never-before-in-humanity transformation of all general knowledge to the free public domain in Wikipedia and google, and yet, humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything.
In spite of all the roadblocks put by greedy publishers, access to literature has never been this easier in all of history even if you are broke. This even if you exclude scihub as an option (not that I am saying you should, I love that scihub exists and hope it continues to).
All I’m saying is, keep fighting this fight but don’t assume it’s anywhere near as important for any real problem in this society, general or academia.
If you want an educated and informed populace (the kind you need for democracy to be worth a damn), then access to information for as many people as possible is a necessary but not sufficient condition. I don't buy that people are dumber today than they were a century ago. People did some pretty dumb things then as well. If you think things are bad now, presumably you would like the situation to improve. I don't see how the situation improves if most people would need to take out a loan to read academic papers.
Something that is worth noting, is that what these kinds of sites are doing is fundamentally the same as what local libraries do. Local libraries get a pass only because there was a precedent for their existence before copyright and IP law got out of hand. Would you have as blase an attitude if this were the big five trying to shutdown all the public libraries?
What an odd thing to say. You're saying that you don't think having to wait months to read a paper through backchannels has negatively affected the research output of that lab?
> This is not even conjecture. [...] humanity seemed to have collectively gone dumber by a century if anything.
"Kids these days" effect. People have been complaining about generational decline for at least 2500 years. What are you basing your assertion on, gut feeling? Social media? Clickbaity news? You probably also overestimate the educational level of humanity 100 years ago.
I did train through times when access to articles wasn’t easy (because there was no scihub and I worked in india) and honestly getting the articles was not even my 10th biggest concern. I always had 50-100 pdfs ready to read, adding more to that queue was not an issue. Only times when access to literature was a problem was when you had a particular article you needed details from (which weren’t in the abstract). This was rarely a blocker and if it was there were options.
Again, I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer to have free unfettered access to all research ever performed, or that we should give these publishers a pass, but I want to emphasize that this is not a big issue for academics. Funding, focus, politics, the culture of publish or perish, the Ponzi scheme like training funnel, these are the bigger issues.
bigger issues, perhaps, but it's not either-or, and the issues are connected.
the monopoly on publishing centralizes control over information, which allows publishers to set the terms (publish or perish, publishing focus)
the political and funding landscape are then shaped by an entity that now has a structurally adversarial relationship to the academics that form it's value base, as it's interests are only served by keeping that community subordinate.
The current publishing model is obsolete and broken. To start to fix it, publishing of scholarly/research articles and Books must be treated completely differently. Their only intersection is that the development of both of them CANNOT be based on a scarcity model.
* For scholarly/research articles, the solution is clearcut: Research institutions pay researchers a monthly wage, to do research and produce papers. It's as easy as writing a PDF and uploading it to Arxiv [1]. As a second step, companies like Elsevier, Springer or Macmillan can function as "webs of trust": Getting subscription money for their service, and providing a curation and indexing service as they do now. Shit, they even could provide Editorial/proof-reading services to Universities for people writing the articles. That way, the information itself will be free, and the core value of Elsevier and the others can still be monetized.
* For Books, the "write once get paid forever" model must be stopped. Once the book is written and published, it should be freely shareable. To achieve that, authors should use a model similar to "Kickstarter": Write a TOC, maybe a teaser chapter and look to raise the money he wants to write the full book. (Maybe the book was already written, and chapters are released as their full price is paid). That way the author will benefit in full for the "fair" value of what he wrote, and society will be able to use that knowledge.
[1] I did one: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1738790492983466495... published only in Arxiv, and it got 9 citations.
The academic publishing industry in general, and Elsevier specifically, are a curse upon academia and human progress in general. But they only have power if we give it to them. There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos.
Of course, an intermediate horror scenario will then come true if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll. However, that could finally push us over the edge to rethink intellectual property timeframes.
> There is still hope that one of these days, young academics will choose to simply not publish there anymore, and when the old guard dies off so will interest in the old information silos.
This will happen a lot quicker if more people work to improve FAIRness (Findability, Accessibility, Interop, Reusability) of content and information that's outside proprietary silos already. Whether old content that has become legally available due to its age, or content that's been published openly in the first place. That's what it would take for people to ignore the silos outright.
> ...if the IP-holding ghoulish husk of Elsevier is snapped up by an IP troll.
Most large publishers are pretty much IP trolls anyway. The incentives inherent in IPR regulation, combined with large monopoly power, push them towards that model.
The problem (at least for me) is that science is inherently collaborative and most authors on a paper have no say on where a paper is submitted to. Yes, I can say, "We shouldn't publish this in an Elsevier journal because of all the shady things they've done to increase the costs to libraries while providing little added value" and they'll say "The paper is about X. Everybody who works on X publishes in Elsevier's Journal of X. If we don't publish there nobody who works in the field will know about our work".
Related:
In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33369378 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)
In Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11009809 - Feb 2016 (25 comments)
To be honest, I expected a bigger discussion on this topic.
There are some discussions about libgen and sci-hub with a lot more comments, where you also find broad support of libgen and sci-hub in the comments, such as for example:
Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21692222 - Dec 2019 (257 comments)
Indian academics throw weight behind Sci-Hub and LibGen in landmark case - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29366621 - Nov 2021 (89 comments)
Today Sci-Hub is 10 years old. I'll publish 2M new articles to celebrate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28421477 - Sept 2021 (161 comments)
Sci-Hub: Removing barriers in the way of science (sci-hub.io) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11093779 - Feb 2016 (217 comments)
Publicly funded research should generally be available at no cost and bother to the public.
I wonder why there isn't a "spotify for books"? We got streaming sites for videos, movies and music, why not a subscription based library?
We do. It's called a library.
With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device. My country's libraries doesn't really offer ebooks to borrow, my device doesn't support Amazon DRM, and Amazon Unlimited in not available in my region.
So no, we don't have such a thing.
Frankly "borrowing an ebook" just does not make sense to me.
After many millennia of humanity striving to preserve knowledge we now have a way to make unlimited perfect copies of books but instead of really making use of it we instead put an unnecessary complicated system in place that makes the book artificially unavailable after some time.
Its like how early cars in Britain had to be preceded by a guy with a flag, really- trying to force and limit a new invention into the existing outdated system.
Or worse it even reminds me of book burning, removing perfectly fine book copies that could make it more likely for the book to survive in the future, like has happened for personal copies of many famous ancient text with the original texts being long lost.
I'm sure every ancient librarian would love to be able to provide books for every human alive - yet we now have the means of doing that, but choose to artificially sabotage it!
Well yeah, at the end of the day, it's just another avenue of rent extraction. I do think that it would be a step up from the current system, where I just can't get ebook, end of story.
> With a library, I can't borrow an ebook to my reading device.
We have this in my little town in USA for over 10yrs now. Movies and music and newspapers too. Only thing that this process doesn't have is microfiche.
I hope this comes to Hungary sometime!
>why not a subscription based library
Why do we need "subscription based" libraries when we have plain, old, free libraries?
I have a very limited experience with libraries. The concerns I had in mind:
1. Currently popular books were never available in the library. When the new Harry Potter came out, there was no way I could have got my hands on it.
2. In my place of residence, Hungary, there doesn't seem to be a way to borrow ebooks. Kindle Unlimited is also unavailable.
Libby + your library card offers a pretty similar experience, ad free.
Amazon has Kindle Unlimited. Also, most libraries allow you to checkout Kindle ebooks.
Kindle Unlimited is not a good model, though. It is extremely anti-competitive. I'm amazed that it is legal in the EU (no big surprise about the US). You can only enter it as an author if you guarantee that your book is not available anywhere else. If you don't put your book on Kindle Unlimited, however, then Amazon will make discovery way harder and sales will be very low. It's essentially a way to keep books on Amazon only.
On a side note, I once had a book that steadily sold 3-5 copies per month, then ran an ad on Amazon that barely boosted the sales and had negative ROI, and directly afterwards there were 0 sales/month. How do I know Amazon's algorithm hasn't downgraded discovery to make me continue to buy ads? I don't, this is entirely up to Amazon and nobody controls or oversees these kind of things.
In Hungary, libraries don't seem to have this option. Unfortunately Kindle Unlimited is also limited to regions I'm not residing in[0].
When doing my PhD library genesis and archive.org made all the difference in the world, I think it would take decades doing it via libraries ...
> stands in sharp contrast to the rising fees, expanding student loan debt and poverty-level wages for adjunct faculty
There's no contrast here - these things are a result of universities charging more to students and paying less to faculty - you're comparing one exploitative industry to another and finding them similar, not different. Don't paint the universities as the "good guys", because they're not.
The article makes some solid points (e.g. that Elsevier adds somewhere between "zero" and "negative" value to the academic process) - there's no reason for this silly language in there.
To give them representation, if not right-of-reply, in this forum:
https://www.elsevier.com/open-access
What part of the contents of the above link is unacceptable ?
Too little too late.
Academics pay through the nose for the right to publish open!
Stick it on the arxive.
Lib gen and scihub are major forces of good, making scientific and technical literature accessible to researchers and students all over the world. Only the rich and spoiled complain about them.
Is there any at to support this?
If you have available storage space, keep a backup of information that you find to be useful or important.
Does that support libgenesis or scihub? Sounds like it only supports yourself in case they get taken down.
The backups are distributed via torrents, so it's a bit of both.
AFAIK Russia has left sci-hub alone. Good for them!
Good for everyone. From academics to students to Wikipedia contributors and even all those who are supposedly harmed by it but actually indirectly benefit
see my comment above, TL;DR if you have 32TB spare and an internet connection, you can have your own Library of Alexandria in your living room.
Before Napster the music industry also had its gatekeepers: the recording companies: EMI-Odeon, Polygram, RCA, Warner Music, ...
Online music piracy destroyed them but then it created other gatekeepers: spotify, iTunes, YoutubeMusic...
This is just one anecdote, but I still don't believe we'll ever have absolute freedom of information. One way or the other gatekeepers sneak in.