I saw this tweet today, which got my attention:
“Federal judge censoring the Internet” is quite a claim, and deserves a second look.
So first thing’s first, we apply the Universal Internet Rule to this tweet, sort of a Reverse Scientific Method of Reading The Internet: We assume the tweeter is lying through their teeth because they are in the tank for some special interest or another, and try to prove otherwise. This must be done before retweeting, commenting, or even having a single thought one way or another about the issue.
Follow me on my journey to put this tweet into some context.
The Source
Mr. McLaughlin, the tweeter, is a Random Internet Dude, otherwise known as a completely untrustworthy source. We can confirm this fact because his bio says, “Information Studies PhD student.”
I will now expose my general anti-school bias, which grows worse every year. I never, ever, ever trust PhDs, ever, for any reason. I used to work for one. They want you to think it’s *incredibly hard* to get a PhD, so you must therefore be an *incredibly smart* person to get one, so you must *trust* what they say, because they *know.*
In fact, that’s complete nonsense. I would characterize it more as *incredibly tedious* to get a PhD, so the only qualification required is an extraordinary level of dedication to mundane drudgery in one narrow topic field. Not critical or dynamic thinking, which I would put forth as a much better measure of a person’s trustworthiness.
Not to mention that you can simply buy a PhD or any other degree, really, if you have enough money. One might even argue that “going to college” is, in a sense, buying a degree. Today, at least.
But the quality of higher education in this world is beyond the scope of this post.
The point is, the person is a student. A PhD student at that. Clearly, he’s aspiring to become someone who can simply say “I have a PhD” so he can circumvent any challenge to his authority. He put it in his bio even before he has one!
(I mean, why *else* would you get a PhD? I have thought about getting a PhD in Computer Science, and I can tell you the only reason I want one is *not* to learn anything about computer science, but so I can say, “I have a PhD in Computer Science” and people will hire me without bothering to ask me a bunch of questions about computers.) (The main reason I don’t, by the way, is that I don’t think the cost of obtaining a PhD in money and time, at my advanced age, would ever be returned later.)
So there’s a big strike against believing what this guy says on Twitter.
The Case
I had never heard of this case before. At least, I don’t think I had. I hear about “the government is killing the Internet” cases now and then from various sources, but I don’t usually do deep dives on them. (I don’t worry about that topic much, because in my personal opinion, we citizens have had a free ride with the nation-state-less, lawless Internet for far too long, and governments *will* crack down on it eventually, and there is no stopping it, unless you nerds are willing to start shooting at law enforcement agents over it.)
I read the document attached to that tweet. It’s a legal document, so it’s rather opaque. The gist of it, from what I can interpret, is this:
It’s a court order that states the defendant Sci-Hub is prohibited from a) displaying any copyrighted works that belongs to the plaintiff American Chemical Society (ACS), b) using any trademarks belonging to ACS, c) saying anything bad about ACS. It further orders that anyone “in active concert or participation” with Sci-Hub (search engines, domain name registrars, etc.) cease providing access to Sci-Hub sites that violate the first three points.
Is that “censorship?” If anyone is getting censored by that court order it’s ACS themselves, the defendant. That doesn’t make sense. It sounds a lot more like a court order to stop people from pirating something that belongs to ACS. The pirated material is apparently accessed by going through an Internet Service Provider named Sci-Hub.
American Chemical Society
What the heck is ACS? I’ve never heard of them. Their web site, which I am able to access apparently because no part of my Internet access chain goes through Sci-Hub, says their mission is, “To advance the broader chemistry enterprise and its practitioners for the benefit of Earth and its people.” So, no help there. I assume it’s a big corporation that makes money for its shareholders by doing stuff involving chemistry. Maybe they make plant food, maybe they make vaccines, maybe they make chemical weapons, probably some variation of all of the above.
On the surface it doesn’t seem like it would be a target of piracy. I always assume pirates would be ripping off software, music, or videos. Not … chemicals? I don’t really see how you could upload a chemical to the Internet for people to download. I suppose it’s possible somebody ripped off some extremely valuable chemical formulas and posted them to a Sci-Hub-hosted site, but I can’t say I’ve seen a huge market for that among the general pirate community. I mean, it’s not like you can go to Pirate Bay and click on the “chemical formulas” section of the web site to browse the latest zero-days.
So I need to read more about this case and what it’s all about before I can render any further judgments.
The Research
Google searches brought me first to the press release from American Chemical Society themselves. Obviously this is probably not the most fair-minded assessment of the situation, but we get a few more details. Sci-Hub is apparently a “a self-proclaimed web pirate organization that steals and then illegally reproduces and disseminates copyrighted scientific research articles on the internet.” I don’t know if that’s true, but we’ll find out in a bit. Regardless, we were correct in guessing this to be more of a piracy case than a censorship case. So Mr. PhD student has lost quite a bit of credibility in my eyes now.
After just reading this press release, I’m inclined to say, “Good job, courts!” Obviously pirating copyrighted material is illegal, and if you get caught, you should be punished. Obviously scientific research papers are copyrightable material. This seems like a no-brainer to me. As a person whose entire life and livelihood is based around creating and selling intellectual property, I don’t see a problem with this.
There is a contingent of people on the Internet who believe “information wants to be free” or some Utopian nonsense like that. I can only assume Mr. PhD is part of that group based on his reading of the case as pro-censorship. I can understand the free information concept from a certain idealistic point of view–information benefits everyone in the human race so it should be shared as much as possible for the good of the species–but unfortunately we live in reality and people have to make a living.
Sci-Hub
I’ve pretty much made up my mind already at this point, but in fairness, let’s see if we can find out if Sci-Hub is the den of evil that ACS thinks they are.
Yes. Yes, they are.
Okay maybe not “evil” but clearly “illegal.”
Google search (actually Yahoo search since I’m using Vivaldi browser and I haven’t changed the default search engine, to throw them a few cents for their efforts on the browser) came up with two top results: scihub.org and a Wikipedia entry. I’m not going to link the site so you can click on it, just in case search engines decide to blacklist me. But I screengrabbed the scihub.org page so you can see it.
Everything about those pages screams “pirate site” to me.
It turns out that might not even be the real site, though. According to the Wikipedia entry for Sci-Hub, they’ve been shut down many times and their domain name changes. Nothing says “reputable” like repeatedly getting shut down and moving someplace else.
In 2015 academic publisher Elsevier filed a legal complaint in New York City against Sci-Hub alleging copyright infringement by Sci-Hub, and the subsequent lawsuit led to a loss of the original sci-hub.org domain. Following the first domain loss, Sci-Hub has cycled through a number of domains, some of which have been blocked in certain countries. Sci-Hub has been controversial, lauded by parts of the scientific and academic communities and condemned by a number of publishers.
These guys are basically the Pirate Bay of scientific research. Depending on your views about Pirate Bay (Wikipedia article), you might see that as a good thing or a bad thing.
Intelligent people can debate over the pros and cons of making scientific research freely available. I can certainly see how big corporations can and will leverage their position to make buckets of money from their proprietary research, making it impossible for smaller scientific groups to compete. I can understand how that could be a problem.
But the bottom line is that it is clearly, obviously, beyond-a-shadow-of-a-doubt illegal to redistribute copyrighted work, based on currently-accepted intellectual property laws around the world. It is *certainly* illegal or at best violating terms of service to do it in the way Sci-Hub does it. From Wikipedia:
The site bypasses publishers’ paywalls using a collection of credentials (user IDs and passwords) belonging to educational institutions which have purchased access to the journals. In April 2016, Elbakyan told Science that many anonymous academics from around the world donate their credentials voluntarily, while publishers have claimed that Sci-Hub relies on credentials obtained by phishing. Elbakyan claims that although she cannot guarantee that none of the credentials have been phished, she has never been involved in phishing herself.
Not cool. As a computer scientist, I can tell you–that’s not cool.
