Sci-Hub Has Been Blocked in India
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The Indian government's decision to block Sci-Hub, a popular platform for accessing scientific research papers, has sparked a heated debate about the freedom of information and the role of governments in regulating the internet. While some commenters lamented the restriction, calling it "shameful," others pointed out that similar blocks are happening in other countries, including France and Spain, highlighting a global trend towards internet censorship. As one commenter noted, "Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays," with others chiming in that this is a global phenomenon, not limited to any one region. The discussion took a darker turn with some predicting a "balkanisation" of the internet, where "state networks" with limited intercommunication become the norm.
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blocked
Oh right, France government is shameful too.
At this point, it is a global phenomenon (and there's been discussions at the UN General Assembly on carving up interwebs for "security"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_sovereignty
I'm currently reaching it from Spain after a certificate warning. We have our own disgraceful internet access thing going on nationally at the moment, but it doesn't really depend on domains.
Depends. It seems Spain is doing interception on the data going from/to IPs, as resolving sci-hub.se with my ISP resolver gives me the same IP as I get when doing it externally (186.2.163.219), but when I visit https://sci-hub.se I see a "Certificate not correct" warning, since the certificate belongs to allot.com, which seems to be the party actually implementing the block here.
If you're on Android you can use Intra from google https://getintra.org/intl/en-GB/#!/
Or if you're on Windows you can use GoodbyeDPI https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI
Both will split up your dns requests into chunks so the ISPs filter won't catch it.
These tools obfuscates your headers as well.
# poison the DNS: you can use another unaffected DNS to bypass.
# ISP level or country level content filtering (similar to the GFW of China): you need a VPN that won't be blocked, and make sure the exit node is unaffected. (also the police won't care?)
# take down the server: finger cross that they serve the content from safe location.
In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.
(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)
The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.
Then we meet the question again: how to protect children/copyright owner without censorship?
or how to censor content while keeping freedom of speech?
Sadly, most of the Europe is in favour of various kind of censorship and surveillance, vide https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1n22e8s/stances_on...
I wonder if a french researcher (or a French student in a university/engineering school) could check if it's still the case.
If you had any doubt…
Maybe I'm in a certain type of bubble, but I kind of feel like that's a secondary goal (for many of them), while the first is finding and keeping a position that lets them earn enough money to survive. Some of them are lucky to be able to do both, but quite a lot of them are sacrificing the "pursuit of truth" because otherwise they wouldn't be able to feed themselves by working as a researcher.
Are you aware that you're not paying the authors, but paying the journal, who usually don't pay the authors anything and even demand payment FROM the author to publish their article in the first place? This is not like buying a book, journals are leeches with morally indefensible business models.
Have you ever spoken to anyone who works in academia? Because almost everyone will tell you that they couldn't care less if people get their articles from SciHub. Academia is much uglier than you're romanticizing it to be.
There's a long list of researchers who have done horrible things in pursuit of truth. Research ethics exist to remind us that, yes, other things matter.
What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
> However, the Court stated that Elbakyan, in her first written statement, admitted that the publishers were owners of copyrighted works. It also noted that Sci-Hub were rejected by the Court when they attempted to amend the statement in 2023. Further, it accused Sci-Hub of partaking in “online piracy” and LibGen “by unauthorized means, circumventing technological measures put in place by Plaintiffs to protect copyright in their literary works.” Thus, they rejected the plea.
[1] https://www.medianama.com/2024/05/223-delhi-hc-lawsuit-sci-h...
This is tangential, but deference to precedent has become a huge problem in US and UK Commmon Law. So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position! The "legal research" battle -- like the "discovery" battle -- just adds tremendous time, expense, and complexity, and rarely or indeed almost never benefits the litigants or the court.
As for precedent, yes, things accumulate over time, but by-and-large precedent = predictability. And that is completely missing from our system.
As someone who works in the UK system, I can point to two things I don't like about the US system. Firstly, the inability to recover costs in most cases. This leads to an abundance of litigation (because a party with a weak case has little to lose by trying anyway). It also produces unfair results (because the principle of justice should put the winner in the position they would have been if they hadn't been wronged, but it doesn't because they have to bear their litigation costs). Secondly, the politicisation (and in my view corruption) of the judicial system. We don't have "Conservative" or "Labour" judges here, and it's extremely weird to me that you can have "Republican" or "Democrat" judges given that a judge is supposed to just interpret the law in an unbiased way without regard to their political opinion. To me it seems that Supreme Court decisions are openly corrupt given how often the opinions are divided straight down party lines: statistically you should expect a random mix of Republican and Democrat judges adopting each side.
I was comparing the Indian system to the UK and US ones. I will still take the US system, warts and all, over the Indian or UK one.
I used to be a free speech absolutist in the past. Not anymore, though I still prefer more free speech to less. The UK and India are terrible at protecting free speech. And the laws dealing with defamation/libel are bonkers based on what Simon Singh had to go through.
The second issue I have is with handling of violent crime in general and that by juveniles in particular. The Nirbhaya case is a great/famous example (and the special treatment continues to this day)[1]. Four were hanged. The fifth died in police custody. The sixth rapist-murderer was 17y6m old and was sent to a juvenile home. You have something similar in the UK. In the US, all of them would have faced severe consequences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Delhi_gang_rape_and_murde...
I thought we were talking about the legal system, not the laws themselves. You can have a great legal system with terrible laws, or a terrible legal system with great laws. You can't blame the legal system for the fact that Parliament decides to pass a law which restricts free speech: it's not the role of the judiciary to decide what laws should be passed; rather, the role of a well functioning judiciary is to ensure that it applies and interprets the law (as it finds it) accurately and fairly regardless of the content of that law.
Common law is great. I'm much more uneasy about the alternative - i.e. legal systems where people become judges not long out of law school, with little real world experience, and proceed to make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives and livelihoods without feeling bound by precedent or being expected to explain their reasoning in any great amount of detail.
Also, word note, precedence means 'which things have priority over others?', whereas a precedent is 'something that has happened before'. A car at a green light has precedence, but the common law has precedents.
I've seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use. The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail, so de facto isn't "bound by precedent" -- he rules in favor of the side he's inclined to support. (Posner was briefly derided for laying this bare.)
It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 1.5TB) just about any litigant can find case law to support almost any position. You end up with a system that's much like the Civil Law, but with the added burden of "research."
Sure, and there are people who can array thousands of pages of evidence that vaccines cause space reptilism and chronic nosehair. Doesn't mean it's good evidence.
The basic tradecraft of a lawyer is to figure out what the weight of the precedent on a given question is. Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
> The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
That's what clerks are for. A judge has staff! And usually a solid intuition for what the law is, built on decades of experience practicing in the field. That's why we tend to appoint our judges from experienced practitioners, and not fresh law school grads.
This is admittedly a much worse issue at the lowest levels - magistrates who deal with petty theft and the like. Those people are often fairly incompetent, sadly, but I'm not aware of any legal system that's managed to systematically solve this issue.
> It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 200TB)
The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
But what if the citations are valid? What if they are, at least, credible? That's how it tends to be. Flippancy doesn't correct this.
> Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
Nobody said anything about "returning to monkey" -- the claim is that systems of binding precedent tend to collapse under their own weight, and eventually come to burden courts more than they help those courts. In the end, you're no better off than you are with Civil Law that isn't bound by precedent. This isn't exactly "monkey" -- it's just a different way of administrating the law, and I think time is showing that it is a superior way of administrating non-criminal law.
> The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
All the same, I think you'd be surprised how often lower court decisions are cited when they can help a case.
But here's the thing, even 9/11 truthers tend to make claims that, on surface level, might appear 'credible' to a layman. But only to someone who doesn't know very much about the underlying subjects and is easily overwhelmed by trivialities. Lawyers and judges do actually know a lot about the law. They know how to sift through those precedents. They know what argument is taken from a binding precedent and which is from obiter dicta, and what that means for the case at hand.
Take the Supreme Court, which gets trotted about as an example of extreme partisanship. In the 2024 term (the one just finished), a plurality of cases - 42.4% - were decided completely unanimously, 9-0. 66.7% of all cases had no more than one or two dissents. In only 16.7% of cases did the decision rest on a single vote. And in only 9.09% of cases did the judges align on 'ideological lines' - 90.91% did not follow any such split.
And that's of the cases that reach the Supreme Court, which tend to be those rare cases where there is some disagreement over the law. The vast, vast majority of court decisions are by lower courts, and usually unanimous, because most things to come up before courts have a settled answer in law and precedent. A court case is not an Internet discussion where you can strip mine Wikipedia for cites and refs for some epic dunk. That approach tends to crash very fast and very hard against reality in a court.
Most law is not contentious in the way laymen tend to imagine it to be. Experts are usually in agreement about the state of the law, because most law is reasonably settled, built upon stable and well-understood precedent.
Yes. Then you figure out in what respects the current case resembles the precedent and which is more unique. There are not twenty cases where the facts and circumstances are identical to the present one because that’s not how reality works.
> Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
Literally the lawyers’ jobs to do this.
I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
Sure, but we're talking about an adversarial system where the lawyers are necessarily at-odds with each other, so they research the issue each from their own perspective. Then the one side will present the judge (in motions, etc.) with "here are ten cases that support our position, we've researched them exhaustively," and the other side goes, "no, no, those are distinguishable because X, here are ten cases that support OUR position, we've researched them extensively," -- and the judge and his clerks, so busy that it takes them two months to respond to any motion or communication, often just go with their guts and justify their decision post hoc.
> I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
lol, dude, it's a mess right now. If society cared at all about justice, and especially about access to justice, the current system would undergo absolute root-and-branch overhaul.
They research the other side’s citations, too.
Every now and then, something interesting and unique comes before the courts and then you might see a bigger variety of arguments as each side tries to control the narrative. The court will decide the outcome and, if it's a sufficiently high level court, that decision becomes the new precedent and you don't need to refer to the earlier ones again because the issue is no longer novel.
The problem begins when law doesn't approximate justice anymore and currently it seems both separate from each other further and further. Without that law loses legitimacy. Some legal philosophy might see that differently, but it is the core of the issue.
But reforms are difficult because any lawyer will always be dependent on the status quo legal code. And not every reform would improve the situation.
that is FUD, and irresponsible to repeat
There’s one particularly notorious character whose rate card has been published online. He charges INR 1.5 million per appearance in court.
The reality is of course that then the appropriate judges will hear the case.
Rarely, if ever, will a judge recuse themselves. Strangely, this happened last week.
https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/nclat-judge-chennai-recu...
Here's recent news about another free vpn that took screengrabs of users' sessions: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/a-...
As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, the product is you.
But yes, not a good look to bend down to foreign publishing companies. They should have told them to f off.
Then the universities have to pay a 3rd party both to publish said research and to get access to research done by others in the same field.
Even though it is free for researches/students it costs universities (and therefore indirectly taxpayers) multiple millions $/year.
Fuck that. Also, after the scandals of predatory practices (e.g. https://top2percentscientists.com/peer-review-payment-scanda...) is there really a benefit in using the services these society leeches provide?
That being said Govt. of India did an en mass subscription for many journals for most research institutes, under the One Nation One Subscription scheme
https://onos.gov.in/
Because they’re used to serving the interests of large companies (domestic and international) as well as bowing to any executive comments or opinions. Indian judges rule first with their own opinions and moral views, then maybe look at the law, and then maybe consider the constitution (in that order).
As the article notes, people will just use a VPN or Tor to access the sites. The courts in India do not understand technology (like in many other countries). They just acquiesce to the demands from large companies.
With the indirect pressure through US tariffs, I wouldn’t rule out the executive finding ways to not annoy the US even more through some means.
I have a longstanding pet peeve with it (the judiciary): the entire validity and legality of the Aadhaar biometric identity program has been in limbo, pending hearing by a constitutional bench (the conclusion of “Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank”). This bench hasn’t been constituted for several years. Chief Justice after Chief Justice in the Supreme Court has ignored it and let the executive bulldoze everyone to submit, get this “voluntary” (that’s the official definition) number and link it in more and more databases.
Long story short, depending on the Indian judiciary for justice on large enough matters that affect the entire country and its future is futile. If it’s a simpler matter affecting one or two companies or a political party, the justice will be swift.
PAN card is required for pretty much any major financial transaction so it does open up a major loophole. However it *is* possible to do a lot of things without Aadhaar, it just takes significantly longer and involves a lot of back and forth. The trick is to get past the frontline folks and talk to someone with real authority. Mentioning the Supreme court judgement or better still the relevant ombudsman does wonders in making the previously 'mandatory' aadhaar non mandatory.
I am not very optimistic about the situation improving anytime soon. I'm regularly shocked at how little people care about privacy are offer up detailed personal information on demand.
That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.
What always bothered me about those though is their terribly clunky UI, dozens of redirects, weird auth flows, and more.
what changed? I'm tired of having to use the ps5 as a media player :/
I don't see how "what they're charging is ridiculous, and the money isn't even going to the authors, so it's okay for me to get the papers through sci-hub" is morally justified.
Independent of the above: if it's for work, your employer should pay for the paper access (unless you're self-employed, of course).
It is totally fine to object the status quo of certain aspects of life or society. But in a democracy, the right way to go about changing them is not to just simply take what you can.
They wield power unapologetically, Disney execs would actually kill people if they had to to get copyright terms extended, using dark libraries is a sensible response to the current state of affairs.
All considered, calling it economic rent appears too charitable an interpretation.
https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb202326/funding-sources-of-acad...
And just because a pricing model is not correct or just does not automatically give you liberty to circumvent that pricing model. If you think that Nike shoes are overpriced and hey, there's Chinese counterfeits readily available, does not automatically make the latter legal or even morally justified.
(Note that that's not usually where the price tag for a research paper comes from these days, it's publishers charging for their added value. You might find it debatable whether said added value warrants the amount of money they ask for, but that's orthogonal to the underlying issue.)
> Shouldn't they have the right to sell their findings?
These companies make profit by selling actual products, and by patenting what findings may be profitable. I don't think they can even begin to recoup their R&D expenses by selling papers... On the other hand, open science benefits everyone. It makes public research that much more efficient and allows private actors to make the most out of it.
Plus, I was just using your own logic of replacing "paper" with anything else that I might consume in my everyday life.
I don't have an example of a $60 paper (I don't keep a list) but below is a $42 paper and a $35 paper that I came across very recently.
https://library.seg.org/doi/epub/10.1190/geo2023-0525.1
https://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/52034eb04b657aea,442...
This is prohibitively expensive for the majority of the world.
Remember that the global average annual salary is around $18,000 (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040).
These people cannot access science that is behind a paywall. The fact that they cannot is a failure. Whether its a moral failure, or an economic or a societal one, I'm not sure, but I do believe that providing free access to scientific advancements it the right thing to do.
You eat apples, but if you replaced "apples" with "human babies", then by eating them you would be committing murder and cannibalism. It's an unpopular opinion, but this logical argument proves you are a murdering cannibalistic monster.
Copyright was created for the specific purpose of censorship.
And obviously, for most individuals and businesses worldwide 20k USD/year is an insane expense, the fact that big moneybags that could have easily paid might get to come along for the ride is a small acceptable price to pay for making information universally accessible.
I spend that much on computer hardware, and again that much on cloud services, and again that much on airfare each year, and I’m a one-person shop with very high margins.
Services are also a supply chain.
> Why Sci-Hub stopped
> The court order was not the main reason Sci-Hub stopped releasing new papers: by 2022 most university libraries implemented two-factor authentication, and as a result, Sci-Hub could not automatically login to libraries using student / researcher username and password to download new papers. Those paywall-circumvention methods that worked well in 2011-2015 became useless in 2022.
Unfortunately this is a common tactic - get a ruling which favors you and then file for delays citing sometimes ridiculous excuse. There is no concept of "justice delayed is justice denied" - lot of cases stay in limbo.
>I'm aware that although the interim order to block the websites was passed, the case itself is not settled. There are currently intervenors in the case, that you can join.
The tactic will remain the same. Keep the case in limbo.
That said, people have the jugaad-mindset so, you can bet if this goes through people will find ways to circumvent at massive scale.
Currently, many LLM services only provide stuff from the study abstract.
Fair use was not explained and the plaintiffs took an argument that since alexandria is not an indian citizen or not in india, she does not fear indian laws and that somehow might have tipped the scales.
I am sure this would be appealed and i would like to join in, i already tried to contact people few years ago but life got in the way.
btw, i am a licensed indian lawyer
I hope this gets overturned, but then again, if you're using the internet without a privacy-first VPN like mullvad, GG.
And requiring open access publication is not the solution. The journals demands couple of thousands at least in fees if you opt on this option which is a waste of money that could be spent better.
The scientific publications industry profit margin is the highest in the world. Higher even than the High tech companies for a reason [1].
[1] https://theconversation.com/academic-publishing-is-a-multibi...
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