Posts tagged piracy
via TorrentFreak
via TorrentFreak
A spiritual successor to Aaron Swartz is angering publishers all over again
I started the website because it was a great demand for such service in research community. In 2011, I was an active participant in various online communities for scientists (i.e. forums, the technology preceding social networks and still surviving to the present day). What all students and researchers were doing there is helping each other to download literature behind paywalls. I became interested and very involved. Two years before, I already had to pirated many paywalled papers while working on my final university project (which was dedicated to brain-machine interfaces). So I knew well how to do this and had necessary tools. After sending tens or hundreds of research papers manually, I wanted to develop a script that will automate my work. That’s how Sci-Hub started.
Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems With Digital Colonialism
Many on the listserv are framing Angola’s Wikipedia pirates as bad actors who need to be dealt with in some way so that more responsible editors aren’t punished for their actions. This line of thinking inherently assumes that what Angola’s pirates are doing is bad for Wikipedia and that they must be assimilated to the already regulated norms of Wikipedia’s community. If the developing world wants to use our internet, they must play by our rules, the thinking goes. But people in developing countries have always had to be more creative than those for whom access to information has always been a given. A 20-year-old developer in Paraguay found a vulnerability in Facebook Messenger that allowed people to use Free Basics to tunnel through to the “real” internet. Legal questions aside (Angola has more lax copyright laws than much of the world), Angola’s pirates are furthering Wikipedia’s mission of spreading information in a real and substantial way.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/wikipedia-zero-facebook-free-basics-angola-pirates-zero-rating
Somali “Pirate leader” on trial in Bruges
Mohamed Abdi Hassan is seen as the leader of a group of pirates responsible for hi-jacking countless vessels off the coast of Somalia. Belgian prosecutors are taking him to court for the hi-jacking of the Pompei, a vessel operated by the Belgian dredging company Jan De Nul. The crew of the vessel was only released after a ransom of two million euros was paid. Abdi Hassan was enticed to come to Belgium in 2013 after he was convinced that a film was to be made about his life as a pirate. The chief defendant was also active in Somali politics and when he was detained a high-ranking Somali official who was accompanying him was also arrested. Both men now face charges in Bruges.
Colombian Student Faces Prison Charges for Sharing an Academic Article Online
In many parts of the developing world, students face barriers to access academic materials. Libraries are often inadequate, and schools and universities are often unable to pay dues for expensive, specialized databases. For these students, the Internet is a vital tool and resource to access materials that are otherwise unavailable to them. Yet despite the opportunities enabled by the Internet, there are still major risks to accessing and sharing academic resources online. A current situation in Colombia exemplifies this problem: a graduate student is facing four to eight years in prison for sharing an academic article on the Internet. He wasn’t making a personal profit from sharing the article—he simply intended for other scientists like him to be able to access and cite this scientific research.
Introducing The Paper Bay
It’s a beautiful business to be in: publish research that you took no part in, claim the copyrights to the results of that research, publish the research in a very expensive journal, publish reprints at exorbitant fees and finally, when a more efficient distribution method appears get rid of all the costly components of the business but keep the prices the same. According to one person I spoke to who is knowledgeable about the publishing field the profit margins dwarf even those of the publication of pornography.
Sweden, Paradise Lost: Part 2 – Private Police Forces
So Sweden has granted private corporate interests – the copyright industry – more extensive powers than the Police, in terms of cracking down on the Net and making dissent and civil disobedience dangerous.
http://falkvinge.net/2012/04/22/sweden-paradise-lost-part–2-private-police-forces/