[1] https://www.timeshighereducation.com/opinion/2048-informatio... (turn off js to view)
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?
Bill Gates convinced them not to free up the IP. No joke.
That's quite an understatement.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
But yeah academics love piracy;)
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).
[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...
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
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
* 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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
So no, we don't have such a thing.
Why do we need "subscription based" libraries when we have plain, old, free libraries?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.elsevier.com/open-access
What part of the contents of the above link is unacceptable ?
Academics pay through the nose for the right to publish open!
Stick it on the arxive.
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.
