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.
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.
SanjayMehta · 1h ago
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.
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.
willgax · 2h ago
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.
diggan · 28m ago
> 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.
melagonster · 22m ago
Yes, but giving people a dream is a good way to let them look for low salary jobs.
nesk_ · 2h ago
What a shameful government!
clicks the link
blocked
Oh right, France government is shameful too.
tavavex · 2h ago
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.
Levitz · 21m ago
> 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.
ignoramous · 44m ago
> Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries.
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.
ytch · 13m ago
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?
crinkly · 8m ago
It's only blocked on certain ISPs in the UK. Mine (Zen) is not blocked.
Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?
ytch · 4m ago
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 server the content from safe location.
adithyassekhar · 7m ago
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.
Both will split up your dns requests into chunks so the ISPs filter won't catch it.
robinsonb5 · 1h ago
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.
diggan · 25m ago
> 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.
adithyassekhar · 10m ago
You can keep refreshing the page and eventually it will work.
diggan · 2h ago
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 :)
faangguyindia · 3h ago
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.
the-mitr · 1h ago
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
India has nothing to gain and everything to lose with this block.
goku12 · 2h ago
I wish the courts would care about that. Especially the Delhi High Court, which is one of the most politically driven among the bunch.
boramalper · 44m ago
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.
tim333 · 2h ago
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).
tavavex · 2h ago
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.
elashri · 1h ago
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].
This site is blocked at my workplace as well. A message from FortiGate says: "Category: Illegal or Unethical"
pmdr · 1h ago
But has sci-hub really been working as of late? Last time I checked I couldn't find anything.
hnhg · 2h ago
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.
lenkite · 44m ago
Seems like the Indian High Court has decided to kneel to western land lords.
goku12 · 1h ago
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.
stonecharioteer · 27m ago
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.
hto23i423o4234 · 2h ago
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").
No comments yet
2Gkashmiri · 58m ago
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.
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...
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.
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...
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.
clicks the link
blocked
Oh right, France government is shameful too.
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.
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
Then we meet the question again: how to protect children/copyright owner without censorship?
or how to censor content while keeping freedom of speech?
If you had any doubt…
# 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 server the content from safe location.
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.
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.
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.
Currently, many LLM services only provide stuff from the study abstract.
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/
> 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.
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...
I hope this gets overturned, but then again, if you're using the internet without a privacy-first VPN like mullvad, GG.
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").
No comments yet
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