back
13 comments
Discussed 8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18370446
Imagine being against sharing knowledge and advancing human progress.
The counter argument is that someone has to finance creation, review and distribution of knowledge.

Of course Elsevier doesn't pay authors of papers, doesn't pay reviewers (but pays editors who coordinate) has to pay only little (especially compared to days of print magazines) for distribution.

In many, if not most, cases taxpayers, endowments or corporations fund the research.

Elsevier just clips the ticket.

Which means its not a counter argument.
Exactly, it's a talking point and I wish people would stop propagating it.
It’s not that hard, I watched Captain Planet as a kid and I swear one of those villains did something similar.
It's a bit complicated case and I wouldn't really blame the court. They were asked to rule on a copyright violation, and copyright despite its bad rep has some good reason to exist. The problem is that companies such as Elsevier have found a way to abuse the system by gaming 3-4 things at once: public universities, research grants, citation/research reputation, and copyright. They are not really s monopoly and it's difficult to blame them for a specific case of a specific journal being owned by them. It's more the overall picture that's broken and abusive, and that's probably beyond the remit of such a court to simply decide. The law applies for everyone, even the big abusers.
Ironically, the creation of monopolies over individual publications is the express purpose of copyright.

That is, of course, antropomorphising copyright in a common figure of speech. It would be much more logical to say that humans are subjective here, thus to appear in subject position of the sentence. The officers of the law instrumentalize the law. "the law" is objective only in a figurative sense, but it is a type of procedure. The courts have a good reason to lawfully observe the intent and purpose of the legislator. The legislature had a good reason to law copyright. That's what I think you said. But there is no good reason for legislature to uphold the law.

Meanhile, Elsevier has failed tremendously at protecting the IP. If that constitutes breach of contract, the contract may be suspended.

This would be circular reasoning, if the court is supposed to offer such protection. There is hope they will continue to fail.

But there is no hope that a state who likewise paywalls public documents like certain laws and statuts could see its conflict of interest.

---

To be derisive: It is ironic that an ex-sovjet country citizen would fight against centralized pooling of resources. Sovjets could not make a five year plan work, but the free market can handle a 70-year plan? Give me a break.

I'd expect Elsevier to sue them for commandeering their domain name like this. Blocking elsevier.com is one thing (possibly actionable in itself), but taking them to a different site with its own political agenda is a much bigger problem. What if they were hijacking a political party's site, or a government site, or any number of other scenarios? Even if they're up-front about the hijacking, they're still effectively taking control of something that doesn't belong to them, regardless of how one might feel about what Elsevier does.
> they're still effectively taking control of something that doesn't belong to them

You mean like Elsevier is taking control of something (sci-hub.se) that doesn't belong to them?

They are not. They are compelling an ISP to block a site (not redirect it) by using the courts.
This cannot come soon enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_S

Are there similar initiatives in US?