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.
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.
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.
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
"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
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").
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.
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;
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.
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.)
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody in China cares about Elsevier and nobody in India should either. Frankly, national research interests should trump some cushy Dutch billionaire corporation.
Another opportunity to state the obvious, which is: We should not let governments restrict the dissemination and copying of information - even if they codify it in law and threaten people with jail and fines.
Copyrights (other than the right of attribution and such) are essentially a conspiracy of publishers' cartels, going back to 17th century British law:
The copyright -- as long as it serves the author, not to be stolen by the publisher -- is the only source of income to authors outside of the academic world. So, that part has to be preserved. And generally, authors should have a say about the use of their work. Only misuse of the copyright (actually a forceful possession) should be restricted.
Even if everything else you'd said was true - your conclusion does not follow. A system in which the state enforces prevention of copying is an anathema and must be dismantled. The access of authors to copy-rent incoming does not justify its existence.
> The copyright is the only source of income to authors outside of the academic world.
That's not true, in two aspects. First, there are multiple other potential sources of income for authors of popular works. Second, most authors of most works don't make money off of the copyright anyway, as not very many people/organizations pay for copies.
> And generally, authors should have a say about the use of their work.
I disagree. Just like poets don't have a say about the use of their poems, so should the case be about articles, books, software, composed music etc.
> as long as it serves the author, not to be stolen by the publisher
IIANM, most copy-rent money goes to publishers, not authors.
10 years should be enough for the authors. The current laws just serve the corporations. Besides, anyone wanting to use copyright for their creations should be mandated to publicly release the source (code, material, etc) of their product after the copyright ends.
The academic world is too entrenched in the established order, and while many inside it would agree with you, the incentive structures in place often work against individual action like this because the first priority is usually publishing in high impact-factor journals, open access second.
Despite some laudable efforts, academia as a collective has proven themselves incapable of fighting the publishing cartels. As a result, it's turned out that the only viable pathway to true open access is large-scale civil disobedience on the part of sci-hub and its users.
This is a very interesting case to watch though as it could finally provide a legal basis on which sci-hub can operate, even if only in India.
My PhD program (EU-funded) requires to publish only in open-access journals. It’s not going to change overnight, but I see more and more important publications in journals like F1000 and eLife.
Important to mention here open access can also mean "authors pay the journal thousands of dollars to enable open access to their paper" (e.g. 4.5k for Science advances). Given that arxiv.org runs with about 16$/paper according to their latest report and most of the important things like peer review, editing etc. is handled by volunteers, I hope the EU will add limits on the amount of funding going to the journals soon to kill this type of rent seeking.
If it was funded by the taxpayers it should be accessible to (all the) taxpayers. This is something that EU (usa,...) should regulate and make it mandatory. If you expect Johnny the Plumber to pay for research, Johnny expects to be able to read what you did with his money.
That's usually just a deflection, you have to pay $5000+ to publish in those newly-established open-access-offshoot journals or pay equivalent for the open access privilege in the old journals.
In most fields, tenured professors coauthor their papers with their PhD students and/or early career postdocs. So what would happen is that they would be throwing those people, whose career depends on publishing in a hyper-competitive environment, under the bus. Apart from losing the funding with which one can renew contracts to students and postdocs, etc. As a tenured professor myself, I have thought about this often (1), but there's almost always someone more vulnerable that I would be harming with that decision.
Honestly, this kind of discussion comes up very often, but it is really difficult, if not impossible, to get out of this situation via bottom-up action. Top-down measures for governments are pretty much needed for any meaningful change.
(1) Actually, to be more precise, all my papers are already open-access, but many of them are in for-profit publishers that charge the author thousands of dollars to publish open-access, which in my view is also a parasitic model and a scourge for science like paying for subscription. The specific thing I've thought about is not publishing in any for-profit publisher at all, but anyway the shackles that keep us tied to publishers are the same in both cases (modulo whether you have funding to pay publishing charges or not).
I don't think anyone who's done research would argue that, but a lot of research isn't mirrored on arxiv/etc when it could be. So I see a lot of these as education campaigns for researchers themselves.
Many/Some(??) journals now allow to publish a pre-print to arxiv and alike and do not count that as previous publication... So you don't get the paper in the "journal"-format style, but the content is the same.
So you can still continue to publish in journal, while the research is also still freely available. Usually you are also allowed to share the published article via email, just not put it publicly available on your website...
I think the arxiv / pre-print workaround could have so much more potential if more researchers were motivated/educated on it. I'd love to see an effort to simply email the top 10k authors to request preprint copies to be hosted. If all they have to do is send a pdf, I think most would be happy to do it.
If you don't publish it in the right venue nobody will read it, which means nobody will cite it, which means you did the work for nothing. At least in all fields where I know people.
My impression is that a huge - but little-recognized - supporter of the status quo has been the National Science Foundation, and similar outside providers of academic research funding. If the big boys in that neighborhood decided that real open-access publishing was clearly superior, then most large universities would quickly adopt the new orthodoxy. Those which did not would soon be hit by brain drains, funding droughts, and "going down fast" gossip.
NSF is not a legislative body. So what exactly can they do ? The congress ain't doing squat. Even the UC system that tried some hard ball negotiation ultimately failed and gave in to most of Elsevier's demands.
"With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[4] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing." - Wikipedia
Let's say that the NSF, during a typical fiscal year, received requests for research funding which totaled far more dollars than the NSF actually had available to grant. And that the NSF had a long-established system of paperwork, procedures, and preferences - to decide which researchers would receive how much from the NSF's limited funds.
Now, if the NSF's preferences were inclined against supporting closed-access publication of research results, and if some universities were not so flush with research funding from other sources that they could happily maintain a "principled stance" and ignore the NSF's crass, self-serving bias...
They won't because their entire career hinges on publishing in these journals. Blaming them for not publishing is like blaming aspiring programmers for grinding leet code. Yeah it would be great if everyone stopped at once and suddenly it became useless, but that's obviously never going to happen. The blame lies squarely with the Universities and Governments at this point for allowing faculty to publish in paywalled journals.
If Universities stopped recognizing work published in paywalled journals when making hiring considerations, this debate would be over in a year. Parasitic journals like Science and Nature would lose their product and the business model would basically fall apart.
What benefit do these journals provide? Is it entirely professional prestige (and the career advancement that follows) or are there other upsides to it?
Yes, plus very expensive web hosting of published papers.
There is also peer review. But the peer reviewers typically don't get any money or even recognition for the time they invested. And that peer review happens before the paper is potentially published and then it will be in its final form.
Sites like Arxiv allow you to update your paper if there is feedback (aka post-publication peer review) which allows for a much larger audience of (constructive) critics.
Meanwhile SciHub and Arxiv host papers for free. So yes, it's pretty much only prestige that makes the difference.
A problem that only needs to be solved because of copyright. Get rid of restrictive laws and watch people take care of storage and distribution for a fraction of the cost using decentralized peer-to-peer technologies like torrents and ipfs. Plus there's always the internet archive.
It's an example among many, of something with a technically clear solution but which seems trapped in a hard to exit equilibrium and collective action problem. The major journals confer prestige and are nearly all paid access. Those who benefit most from the current system will tend to either be the most vested and or least concerned about improvements. This gap creates an opportunity for cheaters to break rank and improve their individual prospects in any collective action scenario. What reinforces the trap is cheaters don't need to be malicious, they can be anxious or have low risk tolerance (perhaps stemming from lots of responsibilities).
In a perfect world, we should be able to say: pick one.
Heck, even in our imperfect world with us mere human beings, I still believe that it would be for the better of academia to keep any "business model"-aspects out of it.
Most of these academics are phonies and are running citation rings. Many of them are the editors and reviewers and so on. So it is in their interest to publish the research in these phony journals.
The copyright laws need an update so authors are not kept hostage to journals. The amount of work and (almost no) money corporations put into running scientific journals is not proportionate to the power they get.
Also the Antitrust Division of DOJ and the Bureau of Competition of the FTC should look into this. These companies do misuse the monopoly position and even collude and synchronise their actions.
Authors have to publish in current journals, do not get paid and then are not allowed or limited in sharing their work.
Another parallel issue is regarding public-funded work being paywalled for no reason, instead of being whole heartedly hosted by institutions rather than being presented only on request to authors.
This absolutely needs to become part of grant requirements. The NIH is doing well (and good!) on this, and the new German government has announced that software funded by the public needs to be free and research should be open.
In Europe this is required in European grants, but also in many country specific funding agencies as well.
In 2018, 11 European research-funding organizations formed what is known as cOAlition S with the primary objective to ensure full, immediate, open access to all publications containing research data obtained in projects funded by its member agencies. The chief premises of cOAlition S were laid down in Plan S, which is scheduled for implementation in June 2020. So nowadays when someone wins grants from these agencies he’s required to publish his results in open access.
It’s not ideal, because many people reserve grant money for open access fees but AFAIK the policy also allows to publish behind paywall as long as you provide publicly available copy in repository (institutional or public like arxiv etc). In my opinion the second option is much better (as it saves money), but not all journals allow to put copy of the article in public repos (sometimes they require that the public version is either before editor’s revisions or puts some time embargo, like a year or 6 months, for publishing final version of the article).
I can't find much info about this case. What is this case about? Can government threaten anything other than DNS block here? Why is Sci-hub fighting this loosing case?
One solution can be to regulate the price of these journals so they are affordable and not cost exorbitant prices . Large scale might still keep it profitable for publishers and researchers.
Gentle reminder that these are studies funded by tax payers money. If America as a country has to deny non-americans access, it makes sense. Especially considering that China is abusing democratic institutions. But it is messed up that us Americans have to pay for it cos the middleman big corporates needs to make money out of it.
> America as a country has to deny non-Americans access it makes sense
Stealing IP is definitely bad..But should access be denied to non-american academicians who spent, time effort and brain time to come with the findings in the first place?
I said "IF" America as a country has to deny, it make sense. Looking at the reaction, I don't think everyone read my comment fully cos they got triggered? Cos this is bad. They deny access to American people whose tax money paid for this. That in itself makes this argument of the company moot. This is nothing but companies making profit out of tax payers money. The whole system is messed up.
If you support better access to academic papers, please support one.surgery[0].
They have a new business model, where only the first X people to request a paper need to pay an amount to access it, after that the payment becomes optional. It's supported by cryptocurrency, so it's accessible to people without banking, if needed. (One of the most legit usecases for crypto I've found).
It isn't. There are more people without access to internet than to a bank. Vast majority of unbanked are the poorest in the world and while they have access to a bank they have no need for it since they have nothing to put in it. If you want to help the unbanked you give them paying jobs. Idea that crypto somehow helps the unbanked is fiction.
> 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