US Judge Recommends Blocking of Sci-Hub from ISPs and Search Engines

monkeymagick

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A judge over in Virginia has recommended a broad order to block access to Sci-Hub. The site operates as a "Pirate Bay of Science" giving users access to over 62 million academic papers and articles for download. Due to not being present in legal hearings for its charge of copyright and trademark infringement by the American Chemical Society, the judge's injunction would award ACS with $4,800,000 in statutory damages including the blockage.

If the U.S. District Court Judge adopts this recommendation, it would mean that Internet providers such as Comcast could be ordered to block users from accessing Sci-Hub. That's a big deal since pirate site blockades are not common in the United States.
 
Not like a VPN won't prove useful in this kind of situation.

Ah well, just like big government and "the people in charge" to not want folks to learn nothin', having an informed educated population is against their plan. ;)
 
Anything that has been funded by the public (by using tax money) should be available to the public, for free. The people paid for it, let them have it.

Like the internet, for example. Make it secretively with tax money, open it to the private sector, they sell it back to us for a profit and the government makes more tax.
 
Does the American Chemical Society pay for these studies or just publish them? Are these studies paid for completely with tax dollars? Perhaps they should change their business model to a more open to the public and upfront cost for access. I was looking to see the cost of access and it looks like one of those "if you have to ask you can't afford it " situations.
 
Does the American Chemical Society pay for these studies or just publish them? Are these studies paid for completely with tax dollars? Perhaps they should change their business model to a more open to the public and upfront cost for access. I was looking to see the cost of access and it looks like one of those "if you have to ask you can't afford it " situations.

I just glanced at one article.
Membership is $166/year and this article is $40 for 48 hours of access without a membership and cheaper with a membership.
article.jpg
 
I just glanced at one article.
Membership is $166/year and this article is $40 for 48 hours of access without a membership and cheaper with a membership.
View attachment 38497
Oh yeah buying real science is real expensive... I seen some studies i was interested at the time ( mostly for enrichment and fun)... Nooope! Way too much money
 
The thing is many of these study aggregators are free to some/all universities. It's also not like say WestLaw or LexusNexus for lawyers where there is a significant amount of value added content with each case being analyzed, summarized, and those annotated notes also made specially searchable.
 
Does the American Chemical Society pay for these studies or just publish them? Are these studies paid for completely with tax dollars? Perhaps they should change their business model to a more open to the public and upfront cost for access. I was looking to see the cost of access and it looks like one of those "if you have to ask you can't afford it " situations.

ACS is a professional organization like ASTM, SAE, ASCE, ACM etc... They make their money from dues of members but they also publish professional papers which are published, sometimes for money (which is a bit dubious because paid for entry does not mean it's professionally vetted as has been recently proven) But most researchers submit these papers in hopes of publication for the following reasons:

1) Recognition of self or the organization they work for (ie: College or company)
2) Altruistic/Agape purposes

I can understand why professional organizations might want to protect their revenue stream. But they really didn't invest anything other than the peer review (which is questionable at times) before publishing. Free access for everyone to information should be covered by dues IMHO. After all you can go to any library and copy a book all you want if it's for research or educational purposes. This includes professional publications.
 
Those prices make those textbooks in engineering school look like a bargain. I don't know if I can afford to learn at those rates.

You don't want to know what my ASTM materials manual cost. It was 4 digits for a book! A big ass heavy book, but a book just the same. And it was outdated every couple years.
 
Has Sci-Hub made a torrent available of the entirety of the data they offer? I know Wikipedia had something like that, you could download something like 1TB that was the entirety of their data, maybe without videos or some such trimming. Would be a novel idea to release that in a doomsday scenario for Sci-hub. I'd like to know just like Bounty if the materials are actually forbidden from being published in this way or are these research cartels just upset about someone eating their lunch.

Edit:
Wikipedia link here; from the details "All revisions, all pages: These files expand to multiple terabytes of text. Please only download these if you know you can cope with this quantity of data."
 
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These judges need to be stopped. The Judicial part of government was never meant to have this kind of authority.
 
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