I don't know why they decided to pause uploads. Relying on Indian courts for sensible and timely judgments will only lead to grief. They do not respect precedence and judgements often depend on the judge and the people involved rather than the facts of the case.
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...
> They do not respect precedence
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.
Strong disagree. A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making. Statute law cannot cover every case, and systems that pretend it can end up being hopelessly vague and unclear.
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.
> A competent lawyer can usually see where the weight of precedent lies, and it's extremely helpful to have that precedent for legal clarity and prospective decision making.
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."
> 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.
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.
While no system is perfect, and it might be a case of the grass being greener on the other side, I have some healthy respect for the US system. I am not a fan of the UK system which we have copied almost wholesale. The laws and judgments I occasionally see from there are eerily similar to what we deal with here.
As for precedent, yes, things accumulate over time, but by-and-large precedent = predictability. And that is completely missing from our system.
Precedence should be one consideration, like context, and maybe not too much interpretation or opinion.
The key factor in a high profile case is to hire the right (expensive) lawyer.
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...
I can see the point, but repeating the same action for which you are currently being prosecuted will hardly improve your standing before the court. Quite the opposite, in fact.
What did they expect? That an Indian court will give them some kind of immunity from copyright laws? From some media reports I see, the court has already made up its mind on the issue during a previous hearing:[1]
> 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...
An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth. Nothing matters, and nothing should matter other than that. For future discoveries, we should make knowledge as accessible as possible. But when an organization forms, it competes for power and superiority. This results in discriminatory actions that cause the overall regression of collective innovation. It is sad to see this happen.
> An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth.
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.
Yes, but giving people a dream is a good way to let them look for low salary jobs.
Scientists can reproduce the findings and publish their own paper, instead of pirating someone else work.
No, no, no, no, no!
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 a shameful government!
clicks the link
blocked
Oh right, France government is shameful too.
Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries. I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain. I'm just glad that my country is still holding out with no centralized censorship authority or mechanism to mass block websites, though that might not last for long with how things are going right now.
> I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain.
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.
> Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries.
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
Central European here. We live for piracy (imagine a more positive term). We do not intend to destroy it. Which means sci-hub and libgen are going to stay. So are torrent trackers. We have our own, too.
If piracy was somehow blocked in Central European countries, there would be actual riots.
My thoughts as well!
Same in Germany, unfortunately. Was on HN a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003033
When scihub main ip/domain was banned by commercial ISPs in France, I could still access it through Renater, which is extremely ironic.
I wonder if a french researcher (or a French student in a university/engineering school) could check if it's still the case.
Same in Denmark. They even stopped DNS-blocking it by redirecting to a page telling you that you have been blocked. Instead they now DNS-block it by redirecting you to 127.0.0.1.
Works for me in France using the 1.1.1.1 DNS server, which I use on all my devices.
Also United Kingdom.
Then we meet the question again: how to protect children/copyright owner without censorship?
or how to censor content while keeping freedom of speech?
It's only blocked on certain ISPs in the UK. Mine (Zen) is not blocked.
> France government is shameful too
If you had any doubt…
Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?
Depends how it's implemented - once you've found the correct IP address you still have to connect to it, and some ISPs block and otherwise mess with traffic at that stage.
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.
> Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?
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.
You can keep refreshing the page and eventually it will work.
Most ISPs nowadays use DPI to do these blocks which are actually redirects. And with how ssl certificates work, users will only see an error page instead of the redirected domain.
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.
If you have DNS-over-HTTPS enabled, then ISP won't be able to interfere with DNS. Right?
Depends on how they implement the censorship:
# 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.
same in Italy (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
Ironically, hosted on a page that me in "modern" Spain cannot read as Sci-Hub been blocked here with a lot of ISPs for a long time :)
Knowledge should not be restricted in anyway, we should have direct access to these and also LLMs as well.
Currently, many LLM services only provide stuff from the study abstract.
India has nothing to gain and everything to lose with this block.
I wish the courts would care about that. Especially the Delhi High Court, which is one of the most politically driven among the bunch.
It is rather unfortunate, sometime back even internet archive had been blocked (it was unblocked after sometime). Going forward researchers should take a firm stance that all research will be published as open access (not the gold one). That is the only long term solution.
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
It's also 'blocked' in the UK, to the extent that I had one more click, on the vpn button, to read the article. (Veepn free browser extension seems to work well - I've used that for a year or two).
That's not 'blocked'. That's just blocked, no quotation marks needed. Most countries' blocking attempts can be bypassed via VPNs, but that doesn't make the frameworks that let this happen any less threatening.
I'd strongly advise against free VPNs; they are a massive security and privacy risk.
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.
This site is blocked at my workplace as well. A message from FortiGate says: "Category: Illegal or Unethical"
For those who didn’t read the full article, because people often don’t, here is the actual / other major reason why Sci-Hub stopped:
> 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.
This is also a reminder that any serious science funding policy changes would address the elephant in the room. Science publication industry employ lobbies of course but the fact still that the requirements of hiring committees and funding decisions on publications in prestigious journals is the reason for this problem.
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...
Seems like India is shooting itself in the foot by making it more difficult to access knowledge for the benefit of overseas publishers. Countries that don't do this will be at an advantage.
Seems like the Indian High Court has decided to kneel to western land lords.
This one is a decision by the Delhi High Court. Something that can be overridden with legislation in public interest. However, I'm not holding my breath this time.
But has sci-hub really been working as of late? Last time I checked I couldn't find anything.
Piracy is not a problem India needs to deal with, we have bigger fish to fry. Accessible knowledge is absolutely necessary here, with even the educated masses now believing in complete hokum.
I hope this gets overturned, but then again, if you're using the internet without a privacy-first VPN like mullvad, GG.
been following the case since day 1. Its sad that the order does not talk about any of the points raised by scihub. This appears to me a one-sided order where the judge (we do not have jury concept in india) might have been a case of "we are copyright holders, our rights trump everything" when the case is for public good and fair use.
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
What's wrong with you India?
India is like a obsequious slave: it'll endlessly suck-up to the West, but then harden-up like anything, when this sucking-up goes unacknowledged (like the recent tariffs).
One of Colonization's sad effects (fairly sure all the Indian bureaucrats are helping with this to "settle" out their children in US/Europe with kickback "scholarships").