<story><title>Scientific research piracy site hit with $15M fine</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/scientific-research-piracy-site-hit-with-15-million-fine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pzh</author><text>Why Elsevier would feel entitled to the copyright of publicly funded research is beyond anyone&amp;#x27;s guess.&lt;p&gt;This ruling actually makes me realize that SciHub is a single point of failure, and if it gets closed, there won&amp;#x27;t be anything else to replace it. Unlike the thousands of torrents and streaming sites for movies and TV shows, research paper sites aren&amp;#x27;t something that the average Internet users care about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sedachv</author><text>There was a great post by &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;user?id=maxxxxx&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;user?id=maxxxxx&lt;/a&gt; about why the ruling class of the United States views copyright the way they do:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Copyright and IP (and probably real estate) are pretty much the only way for capitalists to make money the more things like internet, 3D printing, AI, robotics and so on are available to the masses. To me it&amp;#x27;s the only way to keep the current power structures intact so for a lot of powerful people copyright laws are probably the most important laws. They don&amp;#x27;t need the state for personal protection (they can pay for security guards instead of police) but they need the state for protecting their livelihood.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=12514611&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=12514611&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Scientific research piracy site hit with $15M fine</title><url>https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/06/scientific-research-piracy-site-hit-with-15-million-fine/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>pzh</author><text>Why Elsevier would feel entitled to the copyright of publicly funded research is beyond anyone&amp;#x27;s guess.&lt;p&gt;This ruling actually makes me realize that SciHub is a single point of failure, and if it gets closed, there won&amp;#x27;t be anything else to replace it. Unlike the thousands of torrents and streaming sites for movies and TV shows, research paper sites aren&amp;#x27;t something that the average Internet users care about.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>agumonkey</author><text>It seems cloneable, scihub is backed by libgen which receives every proxied document and serve them as torrents (with stable availability). Also the files db is public. It&amp;#x27;s a bit large in total, something like 20TB for all files, 200MB db dump.&lt;p&gt;Still the sci hub proxy is indeed a single point of failure, but people could mirror the already stored part. I&amp;#x27;d do it if I had a team.</text></comment>