this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
1133 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
59608 readers
5699 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why would they?
They don't get paid when people pay for articles.
Back before everyone left twitter, the easiest way to get a paywalled study was hit up to be of the authors, they can legally give a copy to anyone, and make no money from paywalls
Also, no researcher would even exist if grad students had to pay for the papers they read and cite. A lot of people is not fortunate enough to have access to these publications through their uni. Heck, even when I had it, I'd still go to sci-hub just for the sake of convenience.
Like a lot of services nowadays, they offer a mediocre service and still charge for it.
That's still the easiest way. Email them, don't tweet them.
It still works. The journal websites always include author contact info, just e-mail them.
Not necessarily. They often do not own the copyright, so then it depends on fair use exceptions. The real owners have gone after authors, which may be the reason they don't make their articles downloadable by default.
The asking makes it legal if I recall correctly.
They can't host a site with all their articles/papers/research, but if anyone asks for a single copy, they can provide it at their discretion.
And since they don't make any money either way, most provide it and are happy to do so.
Not generally. There may be fair use exceptions allowing the sharing in some situations (depending on jurisdiction) or the publisher/owner may allow it as part of the licensing contract. But I don't know in what jurisdiction/under what contract, it would be legal to copy something just because some random person asked.
deleted
Well, opinions on morality... I think the whole artificial paywalling should be abolished as being against the public interest. A large faction here seems to take a very right-wing view on property, including copyrights, and will always side with owner.
How would you turn your moral intuition into a general law?
deleted
Tricky intuition. It would mean that authors could not transfer all rights. In that sense, it would limit what they can do with their output. Depending on how far you want to take this, it might not matter or it might not matter a lot. EG how much would you pay for the rights to an ebook if the author can always go and create a legal torrent?
Do you really think it should matter if the new owner is an individual or a corporation? If you only limit corporations, then the rights will simply be transferred to individuals.