Textbook publishers sue shadow library LibGen for copyright infringement A group of large US science and education publishers are trying to get "notorious" online database Library Genesis – known by students as LibGen – kicked offline and claw back some of the cash they allege the owners made from copyright infringement. The suit, filed in a New York federal court [PDF], asks for a legal order " …
Where those who dare to challenge the knowledge monopoly created by "academic publishers" deserve no more than being causally called a thief. ("ostensibly by nicking millions of pieces of research from behind science publishers' paywalls"). You didn't notice EFF's award to Alexandra, among others who are trying to extract the planet's (often taxpayer funded) knowledge from behind the paywalls??
If I wanted to read Elsevier et al's press releases, I'd go to their web sites.
I, too, don't like paying for stuff but as I get older I respect the time and effort that goes into creating it. You can wave your hands about and shout "knowledge monopoly" all you like, but this is still people copying other peoples work without permission and taking money for doing so. I'm thinking specifically of textbooks here, no doubt because my mother at the end of a three year graft of having her first one published.
I certainly used to pinch software when I was younger. Now I publish it, and the first time someone pinched mine it galled me. I'd suggest you try creating something of value and making a living from it, it might change your perspective.
I used to do research at the tax payer's expense and publish it so others could benefit.
I then reviewed other papers for free in my own time and my colleagues edited for free.- for a journal that charged me $$/page to publish and then demanded $ for me to download a copy of my own paper, after charging my library $$$$ to subscribe
Yep. The public paid for the research, and the exorbitant fees for publishing it. And now people feel that paying US$35-50 for a 24 h download of a 20 year old article is unreasonable? Who will think of the poor, downtrodden multi-billon corporations?
You can wave your hands about and shout "knowledge monopoly" all you like, but this is still people copying other peoples work without permission and taking money for doing so.
The work belongs to academics and universities. But for some reason Elsevier et al are of the opinion that once you have paid them in excess of $5k for the privilege of being published in their peer-reviewed journals (which involves peer-review... except they don't remunerate academics for reviewing papers), that research now "belongs" to the publisher. Whose one and sole contribution has been to compile and edit the journal. Which is legitimate work. But does not constitute a creative contribution to the content.
Their pleas of poverty would sound a lot stronger if they weren't generating profit margins in excess of 30%.
It's long past time that a court ruled the only component of copyright the publishers can lay any claim on is layout. The text and intellectual property is neither their work, nor their property.
Original AC here. OK, so there's no love for Elsevier and their price gouging for journal articles - I certainly get that.
But the article is about textbooks isn't it? It even says "textbook" in the headline - by contrast, Elsevier isn't mentioned in the article at all.
AC>Elsevier isn't mentioned in the article at all<
Article>Back in 2017, several domains of the controversial academic paper filesharing site Sci-Hub were made inactive following a court order and Dutch science publisher Elsevier won a $15 million order against its operator<
People don't realise just how big a scam is often going on with academic texts.
In the UK, it didn't use to be such an issue - largely because exams were not about precise memorisation of passages from books- as is the case in the USA, where it's common for professors to top up their income by writing MANDATORY course books, charging a fortune for them and running regular tests that REQUIRED you to have the latest edition of the book. From the perspective of someone used to the rather more honest approach to education in the UK, it was quite a shock, so I applaud any website that offer means of bypassing this scam.
Ah, I think that you're confusing this site- TheRegister.com- with another site, TheRegister.co.uk.
An understandable mistake, given their similar names and appearance, but that's most likely coincidental given they're otherwise two completely different sites with different approaches aimed at different audiences. (TheRegister.com is a far more straight, corporate-friendly site aimed primarily at the US market).
TheRegister.co.uk included the "Biting the hand..." tagline until it was killed off ^w^w^wdied and was redirected to TheRegister.com at the end of May 2020.
Mysteriously that happened when everyone was preoccupied with Covid, and many were off work and possibly less likely to be paying attention to the old "El Reg", but I'm sure that was a coincidence and not by design.
The story conflates academic textbooks (for students) with what scihub does (research papers).
Textbooks, like most other books, take time to create and are written with the goal of selling books and making money for the author. This is fairly normal copyright territory. That they can be expensive is potentially a burden on students, but why book grants, libraries and (sadly less frequently) second hand bookshops exist.
Research papers are written to report people's research, the authors generally were paid for the actual work and do not make money from the article itself, there is no concept of royalties, often money goes from the author (or their institution or funder) to the publisher. The motivation for doing this is to share your work and count towards outputs for your institution and funders, it's actually not in authors' interests at all for the work to be paywalled as they would prefer more people could read and cite their work. It's like the entire industry works on the "for exposure" model. The copyright sits in quite a grey zone, the people who wrote the work (who you might think have the copyright) often are required to assign it to the publisher, or the publisher claims a share in the copyright from essentially typesetting, some pressure applied has meant that mostly authors can make the pre-proofed paper available (often in an institutional repository) and increasingly post it in a preprint archive before the journal submission even takes place, even in the pre-digital days authors got a number of copies they could send out to people on request. (It's still possible, though not that common, to email authors for a copy of the paper if you don't have access, researchgate attempts to automate that process, but in quite an annoying way.)
Except (especially in the US) the professor teaching a university module sets the textbook. Which is conveniently their own work and contains homework assignments that change every year.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with using Libgen for this situation, especially when you consider that the university library often doesn’t have a copy and the price of the textbook is upwards of $200 in some areas.
Not where I studied, a big sheaf of paper handout at the start of each lecture course was the norm, but I did benefit from (for example) Riley Hobson and Bence which is best described as a tome. The situation in humanities is different, where you have to read very widely (perhaps less open to this type of abuse). A new set of homework assignments if needed should be produced as part of teaching duties (sadly the only reason for needing to do this is students post and share the solutions, so you've got a good proportion who are turning in answers without actually doing the work).
Anyway, my comment was mostly about confusing the academic publishing side of this with textbooks. A good textbook takes a lot of work to produce and deserves renumeration, manipulating a course syllabus to flog your own work deserves a good talk with the conflict of interest advisor.
I would add that some schools use OpenStax textbooks which are free to download. Print copies cost money.
I suppose that introduces another conundrum where they compete with text books that are not subsidized, but perhaps they are of a generalized nature that is not an issue.
This “ownership” of published works is quite interesting.
I’ve often found academics have published a paper in some journal which others will formally reference, however, they will present cut down versions at various conferences and symposiums, plus retain a lightly revised version of the (formally) published paper on their university website. Hence with a little web searching and understanding of the different ways English phrasing can be used to title each version slightly differently but actually say the same thing, it is possible to read the findings and gain sufficient to apply, but if you want the full data because you wish to replicate and prove/disprove the papers findings you obviously need the full published paper.
I appreciate the traditional UK low key writing that lets, or invites, the reader to make their own judgment - much more than the US justice warrior dogma approach that that tells you how to think and leaves no room for the reader to utilize their own judgement.
This writer is like a Brit steeped in the low key traditional style- judging by the content and the use of the word "nicking".
Welcome to the new “the US is the world Register”
I missed it on the first reading the key to this piece is the sentence: “ The filing said that according to similarweb.com, the sites collectively were visited by 9 million people from the US each month from March to May 2023.”
This isn’t about us in the world outside of the USA - yet, it’s about US citizens behaving like commies and needing to be saved from themselves.
So the intended outcome is for the corporates to get US based DNS providers or more likely universities, to block these domains.
A concern has to be the words used to prefix the list of domains in the court filing, namely: “without limitation”.
So if a judge is to accept the takedown, joule seem it would give the corporations the power to shutdown any site they claim to be part of LibGen…
That'll stop them in their tracks! Because nobody who needs a textbook will be able to figure out how to change their bookmarks. /s [1]
More interestingly, turn the domains over to the plaintiffs? What are they intending to do with them? Set them up as honey traps and try to sue individuals who go there?
[1] and see article's note about SciHub
... turn the domains over to the plaintiffs? What are they intending to do with them? ...
They will place a sternly worded message telling everyone who visits that they are very bad people.
I wanted to read a scientific paper about electronics from 1913. The only place I could find it was behind an Elsevier paywall where they thought they had some right to ask me to pay 60 EUR to read it. :(
They will place a sternly worded message telling everyone who visits that they are very bad people.
Like those FBI messages shown before movies in VHS tapes and DVDs saying that piracy is bad? That stopped the pirates, alright.
(Arr. Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day)
Public libraries also receive funding. I guess they are in copyright violation as well!
/s in case needed
No joke here. Publishers have indeed tried this in the past. I'm almost certain they are members of the same club where advertisers think we are obligated to view their ads and should be forced to view them by law.
At least, with Orange (France Telecom). Sure, it's not hard to work around, but getting the local ISPs to block the domain names might stop some of the lazier students? Swiping the domain names won't, they'll just pop up with a different address.
Or maybe, you know, try rethinking the idea of milking students for every damn penny?
When I was a student, most lecturers were pretty good, but one in particular was as obnoxious and arrogant as hell. He was only there for access to the labs for his own personal work, and it showed.
He was internationally known for some of his work, and brought the university kudos, which is probably why they let him get away with his disdain for students, and they way he would just read his prepared overhead slides quickly and monotonically, whilst refusing any questions.
Anyway, each year, he INSISTED that we all bought his course books, and they had to be new. Of course, they were expensive. People like him don't get my sympathy at all.
As an aside: at a language school where I am currently trying to learn German, the school requires you to purchase a couple of books every two months to follow the course, but have absolutely no objection to a noticeboard outside the office where the new books are sold containing many offers by past students to sell their used books rather more cheaply.
Either you went to the same place as me, or it's more than one lecturer who did this.
His reply when asked a question in the first lecture - "I'm not a teacher, I'm a lecturer. I'm here to talk at you, not answer questions."
His lectures consisted of reading out manufacturers chip specifications, none of which he said would feature in the exams.
He said the final exam would solely consist of questions taken from his book, of which there were two copies in the university library, so if we wanted to pass we would have to buy a copy.
He also did the usual trick of getting masters and phd students to effectively write his next book.
He put me totally off the topic of computer hardware, something that I've only started looking at again recently from online vids like Ben Eater's 8 bit computer series. Now he would have been a good lecturer.
:-) II'm sure there are many like that - although the additional things you mention struck a cord too!
He's dead now, but I won't mention his name, but I did Electrical & Electronic Engineering at Cardiff University, 1988 - 1992 (Yes, I know I don't look that old!)
As an aside, a little bit more:
As no-one could get his notes down, people agreed to "pair up" where one would write the left hand page, and the other the right hand page etc.
One day, one student had the bright idea to bring in a Dictaphone. He wasn't trying to hide it - he sat on the front row and had the dictaphone on the shelf-desk thingie in front of him, so as to maximise audio quality .
When the good old doctor saw it, he freaked... Started ranting about "If you expect to record my words, you'll have to pay me my commercial rates of £100 an hour.
Tosser
When I went to Warwick uni in the early 90s, one of our Maths profs wrote his own book for the course -- "Derek the differentiable dinosaur". It was available for about 5 quid which covered photocopyiong charges, or we were free to photocopy someone else's copy if we wanted to, since it was all public domain.
This guy was very, very popular.
《When I went to Warwick uni in the early 90s, one of our Maths profs wrote his own book for the course -- "Derek the differentiable dinosaur". It was available for about 5 quid which covered photocopyiong charges, or we were free to photocopy someone else's copy if we wanted to, since it was all public domain."》
In spite of my doubts this talented dinosaur was for real ( thinking 'arry the analytic armadillo :)
"Differentiating Functions of Lots of Variables: Starring Derek the Differentiable Dinosaur : Mathematics and Imagination", Bill Breckon, Warwick University Mathematics Department, 1982
https://books.google.com.au/books?id=548JzQEACAAJ
Unfortunately apparently no (electronic) copy of this slender volume is extant (even on those sites which may not be named :)
My unit at a large state Engineering college have shifted almost entirely to using open access materials for course readings. We found that the textbooks just didn't cover what we teach very well, and they are far too expensive. It only takes a small investment in time to get our students information that is free to them.
TOR ( The Onion Router) technology is probably the future for edgy web stuff. https://www.torproject.org/
just download the tor browser https://www.torproject.org/download/ (based on mozilla) and use as normal.
The idea of blocking sites... is silly.. so easily circumvented..
As to domain names. Central control.. sure.. but.. with onion sites one can have a site and not have any way of it being blocked.
With the TOR browser one can cruise the web with the ISP none the wiser... and be FREE to see what you want.
Use it responsibly...
"When a consumer obtains Plaintiffs' works from the Libgen Sites instead of through legitimate channels" - That's a big fat lie right there which they keep repeating in courts every single time and courts fall for it all the time too. In reality a BIG share of LibGen's content is literally unobtainable by other means, quite a few of those books have been out of print for many years now and no money-hungry publisher will issue a reprint of them anyway (given they're non-fiction, so they won't make a petty penny on them anyway).
It's certainly a bit odd that the printers claim that there is no demand for something, yet complain when someone else provides it.
I've noticed that (official) e-books of current works often display the noise signatures typical of OCR of scanned pages. You'd think they'd have the material in the original electronic form somewhere around the place... nonetheless, I wonder if publishers have heard of publish on demand?
Watching the rotting dinosaurs wave their tiny arms at the courts and slap their chests is at times funny, knowing that the main outcome is the opposite of what they are asking for.
Still, keep a close eye on them. The subtext here is what matters. This is just another veiled ramp to using the government as a blunt tool to use the taxpayer to bankroll the civil enforcement of some of the worst of the publishers.
As many point out, the main "customers" they are chasing are the victims of the textbook cartel, and consumers of academic journals, where the results of purely public funded research go to die behind paywalls. These clowns aren't the good guys or the victims, they are just competing members of a class of middle-man mafia.
Let them hire their own investigators and pay their own court fees.
...and yet, they forget the evolution of the mp3 and video "pirating" that turned into relatively cheap streaming services. It took time and lots of legal shenanigans but it's mainly a stable system now, even it there's really only a couple of "gatekeepers" in the streaming music world these days. I'm not into music streaming and can't think of anything other than Spotify, but I assume there are others in the marketplace.
When a not atypical, required textbook is 50 quid a pop; and you need a dozen of them over the run of a course, I can’t say I blame anyone for resorting to the odd bit of piracy.
The ISO and BSi are particular bugbears. The corporate membership is fine in big biz land; but a small one man band? Gets very very expensive to acquire those docs more or less mandatory to your operation.
>” When a not atypical, required textbook is 50 quid a pop”
I got a shock a couple of years back, the new fully revised edition of a (highly useful) computing book I had used at uni. was published with Amazon pricing it at £156 (and Elsevier wasn’t the publisher).
Back in 1980 the first edition cost £30, according to the Bank of England inflation calculator my edition cost circa £130 in todays money.
From memory many of my core textbooks were around £30, with my yearly (unadjusted for inflation) book spend being a little under £400 - slightly more than 80% of one term’s grant.
"Gets very very expensive to acquire those docs"
Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing how Mopria works as a potential extension to an IPP driver.
Seen the cost of membership to get any docs? FAD, it's maybe no problem for a company that makes printers, but for a guy doing it as a hobby, just no.
(and yes, I've seen the prices of ISO documents, same story really, aimed at corporates and us little guys just don't exist)
I'm finding I use sci-hub/libgen more and more these days, as the books and papers are getting harder to find.
I'll find a reference to a book, either it's not in the library (dark mutterings about the University,) or it's out of print, and not available at the usual booksellers, even second hand.
As for papers, well, the university, and personally can only afford so many subscriptions, and there's a lot of journals, and it just so happens to be published in a journal, 1) you've never heard of, 2) isn't part of your subscription bundle- looking at you RSC.
So, off to the high seas it is.
At a big UK university, our subscription covers most things, but it's still a mess, some things work nicely with shibboleth (so institutional SSO handles it), but others are IP based and you must go through the VPN. Yesterday trying to get an old (1988) pdf from a particular journal that our subscription supposedly covers I just ended up in sign-in-to-access pdfs circles, not the first time I've run into that and you wonder what proportion of the subscription fee is for things that can't actually be reached. (Often an email to library services eventually sorts it out, and amazingly there is still hard-copy of this series floating around in the library system somewhere, but seeing as it's for checking one reference in a report for marking that would simply take too long to do.)
I think it's clear that copyright, certainly for books at least, has run its course and should be replaced by something more in tune with modern technology.
It was OK when copying was difficult and expensive, but when the capabilities of every modern computer include cheap and easy copying, it is perverse to tell the World's population they may not use their computers to their full capabilities.
What should replace copyright, so that authors can make a living? I would suggest some sort of tax on each internet connection, and some sort of metering of downloads of books. The payment to each author, funded from this tax, would be in proportion to the number of downloads of his works. Or something like that.
Your suggestion has already been tried with audio cassette tapes in the '80s where the UK courts agreed that the music industry could tax blank media.
At that time home computers also used audio cassette for secondary storage so punishing/taxing everyone using this format.
After years of publishers treating me as a thief I have zero sympathy for their plight and see their reselling of the same bit of string as purely a state sponsored monopoly and tax upon creation.
These leeches benefit only themselves and it is far past the time that they are recognised as the profiteers they are
Being retired but still interested in stuff, I need to count my pennies. Technical books these days are hundreds of quid. (Even CUP dumped their "student editions" years ago.) If I learn of an expensive book of interest, I look first for a preview with a boot-leg copy. If good, I buy it. No preview, no purchase. I realise that most do not probably do this.
Nationwide Student account has an interesting perk - free membership of an online textbook library.
According to my students it is useful, but it doesn’t fully replace the uni. Library or need to purchase some core books.
Perhaps the publishers contesting this case need to take the lead of iTunes, Netflix, etc. and deliver to market a student friendly subscription course book library service. If they were particularly “creative” they would call it “Bookshelf” or “Encarta” and get Microsoft to offer it as a component of M365…
The global population is immersed in what Thomas Kuhn (philosopher of science) called a 'paradigm shift'. Doubt about the utility of the paradigm was present at its inception, but only nowadays with information stored in digital format, and the almost universal reach of the Internet for propagating digital sequences, paradigms, i.e. copyright and patents, drawing upon the notion of ideas being property to be rented out are specious and anachronistic. For culture expressed in print, an inkling of challenge to rentiers arose when (analogue) photocopiers became ubiquitous. A/V distribution exclusive 'rights' were imperilled by domestic adoption of audio and video cassettes with players capable of recording. The threat to publishers of academic papers arose immediately alongside photocopiers in universities. It took the move into the digital domain before high quality copying and distribution of A/V materials was available to households: 'pirating' textbooks, novels, computer software, and so forth, was not practicable either until wholly digital (storage, viewing, and copying apparatus) was available cheaply.
Purveyors of 'protected rights' content, this purportedly sold on an open market, were 'hoist by their own petard' when suddenly ordinary people grasped the true meaning of 'competition'. Unless kept under lock and key, digital sequences cannot be withheld from the 'Commons'. There is no scarcity. Hence, no 'price discovery'. Therefore, no monetary value attachable to them. The only conceivable connected 'market' to free for all digital is that of selling 'added value' goods and services associated with particular digital sequences.
'Rights' are ceasing to be commodities to be traded. That is a reality brought about by private individuals recognising the ersatz nature of markets for digital entities and through observing the entitlement-dependent 'rip-off' economics of rentiers along with a host of useless middlemen.
What of the noble souls who create, the people now facing penury? That hoary old chestnut is easily despatched when an economic model compatible with real, rather than monopoly orientated, economics is introduced. The market becomes that for creative ability and associated skills: players consisting of individuals and aggregates. They sell their services to other people, to collections of patrons (e.g. via crowdfunding), or to public institutions (e.g. universities, and foundations commissioning works). Industry too can hire innovators; it is free to keep developments as trade secrets; however when secrets escape there is no recourse to copyright and patent law; some start-up companies may find secrecy, if they can enforce it, useful until they find their feet,
The traded commodity is reputation. On that basis patronage is received. The ramshackle edifice of intellectual property law is demolished. In its place will be a small, and easy to understand, body of law protecting creative individuals (and groups) from imposters: there would be a 'criminal' element concerning grave misrepresentation, and a 'civil' element dealing with recompense. Nowhere in the legal backdrop shall there be any suggestion of digitally represented artefacts bearing monetary value.
Sometimes, access can be extremely frustrating. It is pretty hard to get a debit card with international payment capability for a high school student like me, so it's not like I'm simply choosing not to pay, I literally was unable to in lots of cases. I now have a card, but even then it can be prohibitively expensive to get a textbook that I'll look at maybe once if my teacher feels like it. These websites are seriously useful, and in some cases the only way I can possibly learn more advanced things. I'd actually buy the books if they were cheaper / easier to get...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
