https://31.184.194.81/ (sci-hub.io cert)

https://sci-hub.cc (same ip as above, sci-hub.io cert)

https://sci-hub.ac (same ip as above, sci-hub.io cert)

https://sci-hub.bz (uses a separate certificate and ip address -- 104.28.20.155)

And a tor site: scihub22266oqcxt.onion

https://www.facebook.com/sci.hub.org

Their original domain was sci-hub.org, which got shut down a while back. Occasionally they post updated information to the facebook page.

Also, @fuxy. You can change your /etc/hosts file on a linux or BSD box to include the line:

31.184.194.81 sci-hub.io

That will override the DNS and go straight to the site.

Windows has a similar file located here (at least for win7):

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts

A perfectly reasonable location for a hosts file.

Why not just put it into the onion? Put it there once, problem solved.

I believe this inconvenience is minor, however.

When you go to a website on the regular internet, the name you type into your URL bar doesn't contain any location information. Instead, you go to a Dynamic Name Server (DNS) server (often run by your ISP) and and get the IP address, which tells your browser where to go.

With Tor, the hashes you see are analogous to the IP in regular internet: they tell your browser where to go. But there's no DNS for Tor, so you can't hide address behind a name.

Incidentally, this story is about SciHub being blocked at the DNS level, meaning that the domain https://sci-hub.io/ was removed from the DNS servers. But it's still available at the IP level at https://31.184.194.81/

This story demonstrates the need for DNS to be decentralized. ICANN has far too much control and is now using it for censorship that holds back the progress of all of humanity.

IANA would have to un-delegate a whole range from RIPE.

I don't see that happening unless they want to fracture the network.

Perhaps Elsevier will be able to force ISPs to blacklist that particular IP, but nothing more.

I also suspect they will move the domain under a ccTLD, not subject to the whims of ICANN.

Facebook managed to get https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/

A simplified version: X % 2 = H

If I give you the formula, and a H of 1, can you, with certainty, tell me that my input was 1029? Cryptographic hashes have a similar property, just with a very large collision space - for Tor only 1 in 36^16 inputs will produce a given hash; yet you still can't guarantee that an input that produces that hash is the original input (and just guessing the possible inputs will take you a very long time).

The downside of our hash above is that it gives you a pretty good clue of what the original input was: if you get an H of 1029 from the forumla X % 10000000 = H, you'll have a pretty good idea of what the X was. Cryptographic hashes do not share this weakness - they will stretch the input, and ensure that there are no clues left as to what the original input was.

TLDR: they are designed to behave that way. Their alternative name is "one-way hash function".

Edit: I'm wrong. It's based on the hash of the public key. But it's rather confusing. After you create an onion service, you get a private key and an onion address. You don't actually get a public key, just the hostname based on it. I suspect that the public key could be found somehow. But it's not used for anything, that I know of.

But, in short: for a name to be useful in a global context, it has to be unambiguous or unique. If there isn't a centralized naming authority / registry, then that means that you can't be able to pick an arbitrary name. (If you could, you could just decide to use the same name as someone else, and now there's no way to figure out which one of you the name indicates.)

Edit: I'm wrong. It's based on the hash of the public key.

But most people don't run tor often or at all.

Of course, the privacy implications of this are pretty bad if you're just going to load most websites via direct connection. A simple image embed can deanonymize you. But it's probably good enough if you're just going to browse TPB or similar sites and are mostly just looking for a bypass without the privacy concern.

https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/Transparen...

Maybe have even a out of band way of updating it without the registrars involvement.

I guess what I'm looking for would be P2P DNS server although making sure the data is not fake would be difficult without some kind of signing.

Wonder if it could use the bitcoin ledger as a kind of key server?

Edit: I know /etc/hosts does the job it's just lacking if the server changes IP

[1] https://ipfs.io/

Until then, torrents of all the files that sci-hub has retrieved (and all files uploaded into libgens scimag section) can be downloaded here. http://libgen.io/scimag/repository_torrent_notforall/

Anyone can torrent these then host them on IPFS without sci-hub's involvement. However, I suspect you'll have a hard time getting any duplicity for all of this. It's over 50mil files!

This has the additional benefit of having the papers locally for easy indexing and searching.

Think of it as a [sneaker|dark]net CDN enabled by content addressable storage.

echo "google.com 54.215.176.19" >> /etc/hosts

vkontakte: http://vk.com/sci_hub

I'd update my academic website to link my papers to their sci-hub URLs if I didn't think I'd catch a world of flak for it.

[0] With an exception for the AMS, which has always (as long as I have cared, and checked, anyway) had publication policies that are as author- and reader-friendly as one can probably expect in the real world.

My understanding is that CS publishers tolerate researchers hosting their own papers, but I'm very interested in evidence suggesting otherwise.

So, where's your evidence that IEEE can or is forcing PDF's off the net?

(reason I'm interested: I'm on the board of Sage and have a board meeting tomorrow where I hope we'll be discussing sci-hub)

While I have complete faith in my department not being staffed with idiots and zealots, I have no similar faith in our government. Being a state school, that's ultimately who we answer to. The whole Aaron Schwartz debacle evaporated any faith I might have had in our government's ability to deal with this sort of thing like grownups.

Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?

Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture.

So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher).

The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.

There is no cost of publishing your/my papers as open access. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Write paper, send to journal

2. Do the peer review hokey pokey until paper is accepted

3. Upload preprint version to preprint server (arXiv etc.), with link to journal version

If you're brave, you can do step 3 before step 2.

This whole concept of paying for open access is ridiculous and should go die in a fire.

My claim still applies even if those costs are factored in. A yearly fee should be enough to cover everything. Charging $10-30 per article and such is just profiteering.

What I see publishers mainly providing is ranking and filtering (and branding to some extent). ACS has their top level journal (JACS) and several subfield-specific journals, and usually there are ACS journals with different prestige in each subfield. ACS, APS and other non-profit science organisations do a fairly good job at it IMO.

Forbidding for-profit publishers would be my preferred option.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7aIf1YnbbU

And now my ego demands that I go check to see whether the one paper I've published is up on there! :D

I mean obviously it wasn't the whole point if you didn't publish them freely in the first place.

Does this not enrage people? Elsevier and closed-access journals like them, are doing all they can to impede human progress while leaching off of tax-payer dollars to do so. Something should be done to make what Elsevier and the like do illegal, are there any groups/political parties/etc going after them?

I think I have rage-fatigue, with all the swindles, con-jobs and injustices I've seen. But I do recognize this as utter bullshit. Though unfortunately every other effort to take from the commons, charge money for it, and build a private fortune, throughout history, has also been bullshit; hence the rage-fatigue.

This and things like it, do enrage people, and that's why in the US they gravitate toward Sanders, Trump, nihilism, and crime.

I meant something more tangible. A way to assess issues, classify, organize, root them in the economical context and try to find a better organization to resolve tensions.

This does enrage many people, but one feels somewhat helpless here. But we can surely raise a hue and cry over the internet/emails/whatsapp/social media etc. Let more and more of the scientific community know about the existence of sci-hub and let these scum publishers bleed to death. Political parties may not want to disturb their money-givers though.

The idea that Elsevier is somehow not responsible for their actions because they're just doing their job is abhorrent, and I entirely reject it. If what you do is actively harmful to society, the onus is on you to fix it. Yes, the onus is also on scientists, too, to not enable Elsevier's bad behavior, but they're not the ones choosing Elsevier's access policies; they only have indirect control.

You are aware, I hope, that Elsevier curates the content of its journals by literally sending the papers to other scientists and asking their opinion, right? And that the scientists don't get paid for this work, they do it our of goodwill to the scientific community. That's peer-review, and its one of the most preposterous things for any for-profit entity to have a hand in.

If it does, it becomes an ethical maxim to use Tor. If it doesn't, then you can simply use Tor. So by case analysis you should use Tor.

This is one of the reasons I use Tor. If there is such a list, I want it to be full of people doing ordinary stuff. In effect, I want the list to be useless.

Seeking privacy should never be a crime.

http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/constitutional-rights...

Many thousands of people out of several billion (I assume …) Internet users is a small enough percentage that it's probably worth someone's while to make a list out of it. A sibling comment has claimed that the NSA specifically notes Tor use (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637635).

What is this based on? If it's rationality, that doesn't always apply to legal and political matters, to the very human human beings who make those decisions, or to the politial situation around them.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/04/nsa-targeting...

It is a British Territory extension being managed by "Internet Computer Bureau Ltd" based in the United Kingdom.

This is a another good cause that I would find worthy to donate to.

Edit. Ok, found it:

http://www.sci-hub.cc/donate

Apparently, only bitcoin donations are possible at the moment. BitCoint Wallet for donations: 1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM

EDIT: Ah, interestingly, the 1K4t2v address appears on the scihub.cc homepage, but not the donate page that was linked

I even switch over to https to make sure the request is not modified.

They don't even have a valid certificate for that domain.

BUT interestingly, on a US (DO NYC) server or my house (US/Comcast):

  $ curl http://sci-hub.cc/donate
  <p>Please donate to Bitcoin: 14ghuGKDAPdEcUQN4zuzGwBUrhQgACwAyA</p>%

  $ curl http://sci-hub.cc/donate
  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html>
      <head>
  {cut for brevity, a fair amount of HTML here}
  <p>Please send donations to bitcoin wallet: 1K4t2vSBSS2xFjZ6PofYnbgZewjeqbG1TM</p>
  {more HTML}

Appears to be some sort of caching issue. Archive.org shows sci-hub.org with 1K4t2v from 2015[0]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150810074804/http://www.sci-hu...

I realize readers of torrentfreak.com have a different relationship with the word "pirate" but--

This is not piracy. You are entitled to read work from Sci-Hub, as your taxes funded the researchers who created the work. We academics want you to read our work, we do not benefit in any way from publisher paywalls. We continue to publish in these venues because it is necessary for career advancement (whether for us, or for our students).

Please continue to "pirate" our work, and please spread the word about this problem.

Am I entitled to a joy ride in an F-15, as my taxes funded its purchase?

Only a tiny subset of people who want to fly fighter jets get to do that, even if they select the Air Force as a career. The superset of people who are excluded from flying fighter jets includes a large number of people who are safety-qualified to fly them.

The opportunity to fly fighter jets is approximately as difficult to obtain as admission to an Ivy League school. Zero is the number of reasonable people would say that anyone is "entitled" to admission at a selective college.

My canadian taxes didn't pay for american research, should I still be able to access those papers?

Research done by government employees is legally required to be public domain. I see no reason we shouldn't extend that to researchers who take government funding.

Until thousands of Canadians come down every weekend just so they can use American roads and then go back home to fill up on gas, we won't worry about it.

Imagine the same site with pirated high quality scientific books. (There are some, but in darker corners of the Internet). Would open access to these books be advantageous for humanity? Most definitely. Will publishers get mad about it? Even more definitely. Should publisher's work be free? I think not.

However, you can't get both sides of the coin at once. Either authors are paying publishers to get their papers peer reviewed and published (they do now), or publishers may collect payments from readers and libraries. Not both ways.

Library genesis isn't that dark of a corner these days.

http://gen.lib.rus.ec/

http://golibgen.io/

Firstly, the authors of books do get paid—writing books is not a pure tax imposed by academia.

Secondly, books are not typically at the frontier of scientific knowledge (these days). They're interesting and helpful, but accessing them is not a necessity for keeping up to date. Put simply, books do not have a monopoly on knowledge.

Finally, and most importantly, books are not funded by the public. Research is. If the public is paying for something, they should have access to it.

What value does the publisher's work add to the work the author generated?

- organizing peer review - spell-checking and fixing layout problems - making sure that the paper stays available for a long time - handling complaints and retracting fraudulent papers - providing a single point of contact for people who would like to reuse published material (e.g., using illustrations in a textbook).

Sure, many publishers don't do a very good job for the money they are taking. Sure, there might be better approaches for disseminating knowledge than the current one. However, in the world as it is now, publishers can and do provide some value.

- I've heard from several collegues that the editor introduced spelling mistakes. Sure, overall they might get some errors out, but a spellcheck is not needed.

- Well yes. But there is no need for that to be expensive.

- Do we need them for this? If there really is fraud, previous cases show it's their university that starts an investigation. I'm not sure if the effect of retracting a paper is that significant..

- If all papers were public in the first place, there is no need to contact someone if it's okay to reuse material.

Anyway publishers might provide some value, but not enough to demand we pay for every single paper, or pay costly subscriptions. They need to die already or adept.

However, ignoring the traditional role of publishers does not help our case. Regarding your individual points:

- Peer review for CS conferences is usually organized by volunteers, yes. However, this is not true for other, journal-focused disciplines, where there are paid assistants

- One might argue that spelling/layout checks are not really necessary. I personally appreciate them. In any case, these _are_ services that publishers usually offer.

- I was not trying to argue that the typical publisher does a good or cheap job. What I wanted to say is that publishers can and do add value.

- Universities usually try to handle scientific fraud discretely (for PR, HR, and legal reasons). They are usually not interested in disseminating bad news widely.

- Sure, if we could retroactively bring all previously published works into the public domain, things would be much easier. However, in the copyright system we live in right now, publishers provide a useful service by taking care of author's rights and facilitating reuse.

- Publishers really don't do much for spelling/layout. They give you a format to fit in, and then put up an automated system for you to check against.

- Fraud is handled by the community (See: Retraction Watch) much more effectively than by journals.

- Peer review and top-level decision-making. This is handled entirely by the editorial board.

- Typesetting. We have a free system for this: it's called LaTeX.

- Copy-editing and typeset-checking. This is handled by the publisher.

- Publishing and archiving. This is handled by the publisher.

- Famous Name. This is controlled by the publisher and is pure rent-seeking.

It used to be that the publisher handled much more than this. But with a decent online publishing, workflow, and archiving system, and with a near-zero cost in publishing and archiving online nowadays, essentially the only useful service the publisher provides is copy-editing. That is very minor.

If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears.

The big problem is not computer science, I think, which is rapidly moving to an online model. The big problem is that non-CS fields have no typesetting facility -- they submit articles in Word, which Elsevier/Springer then hands off to typesetters in India, who typically reset the whole thing, including bibtex entries, in LaTeX for publication. These entire fields are still reliant on copy editors and typesetters, and thus are stuck with rent-seeking.

I think the right approach is for a journal to require that authors have their papers certified by one of several "copy-editing / typesetting certification agencies" (a concept I made up). It's up to the authors to pay for that. This would almost completely eliminate the value of a publisher, and as there are multiple certification agencies vying, the cost would drop to a reasonable amount.

Edit: it occurs to me that the Wikimedia Foundation is actually in the best position to do this! If you tried this before and still have the old infrastructure or business plan, have you considered approaching the WMF Board?

I abandoned the project well before the infrastructure was ready for prime time: the tenure clock beckoned.

What do you think of Wikiversity's Journal of Medicine? It's a decent stab at a reputable open journal:

http://www.wijoumed.org/

This doesn't feel like a major player yet, but what do I know, I'm not in medicine. In my field, reputable open journals would be things like PLOS One, JMLR, and JAIR.

It's something that could actually be handled much better (and cheaper) by an inter-university p2p network (like BitTorrent). Such a network would double as an on-site, offline-available library of papers.

(Of course, one might argue that other entities might be able to do the same thing cheaper - but this was not the topic of my argument)

(Actually, there already is some sort of "inter-university p2p network": http://www.lockss.org/ )

That being said I'm not a massive fan and I believe there is probably a model whereby you can get these value-adds without the closed down subscription system. Publicly funded research should be publicly available.

I don't understand the logic. We shouldn't ask if the work of people making billions should be free? That seems like exactly the sort of people of whom we should be asking it.

What exact work these publishers are doing? How much are they demanding for that? Who is funding the research? Who is doing the work?

These publishers are just mean middlemen who are trying to extract as much money as they can/want from both the authors and the readers. Now is the time to get rid of them.

Typesetting, third party review, offering visibility in a high quality journal?

The point is nothing is stopping scientists from publishing in other, open source journals. But they don't. That means these journals offer something of value to them.

Prestige, obviously.

The other services are marginally valuable. Honestly, I wish a big foundation would agree to simply underwrite any such costs (to remove these as an objection).

The whole value of publishers is in their accumulated brand value. A brand value which they did not build themselves but instead gathered from decades of harvesting public resources.

It does? I'm genuinely curious. The vast majority of research is funded with public money (to some extent).

Where is all this publicly-funded research published?

Now, there is a delay (1 year?) between when it's published in a journal and when it's freely released, which I can understand bothers people, but it does eventually make it's way out to the public domain.

That was just an example link.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Access_to_Science_and_T...

Why some arbitrary figure like $100M? why not $1M or $1K or for that matter even $1?

It should be other way round, if any research gets any funding (even $1 or 1 cent) then also the papers coming out of that research should be immediately released to public else they should not accept that grant/funding. The journals should not get a free ride for 1 year or so.

Elsevier seems keen to not have third parties review the publications.

And visibility, same thing. They try to prevent it.

Yes, scientists should publish elsewhere; the contracts currently prevent them as Elsevier has power to stop them through their entrenched legacy position.

The effect of Impact Factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor) in academic grants is ridiculously high.

So in the end it's not the scientists who can make the switch. It's the people who pay the scientists.

Tell your representatives the following: The clerks that you have put in charge of funding our tax-money-filled purses for scientific research are just a bunch of uneducated or worse yet ill-educated fellows who do not understand even an iota of academics especially in the STEM areas. So they just rely on a bunch of very coarse proxy numbers (e.g. shitty impact factors) to decide funding. So please remove these clerks from these positions. We can and must install a better and more open system for reviewing where well known scientists/academicians can be invited to participate in the decision making process. Open access journals is one such great way to start. See what is being done by great academicians like Prof. Sir Timothy Gowers and Prof. Donald Knuth are doing for this cause [1], [2]. You may contact these people and get their advice in this matter.

Signed.

Your fellow citizen, a concerned taxpayer and a voter of USA.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Gowers#Elsevier_boycot...

[2] http://thecostofknowledge.com/#list

The journals offer something of value because they provide high-quality taxpayer-funded research. The publisher is nothing more than a middleman, who should be cut out of the equation.

Journals do publish a lot of work by academicians, many of them funded, in the US, by NSF grants (taxpayer money).

Trivial

>third party review

Trivial, and happens just fine without publisher "help"

>offering visibility in a high quality journal?

Most journals are not "high quality." They're often very niche efforts, sometimes started and run as an easy way to get publication credits outside the handful of prestige publications.

Ambitious academics know that one way to raise your profile is to organise your own conference - and ask a publisher to collect and print the proceedings for you.

Obviously that's your opinion, but since when does the effort it takes to create something matter about the price? It's pretty trivial to move product from a factory to a retail store, yet people have no problem paying for that.

And again, if it's trivial, then there is nothing stopping anyone from starting their own journal. But amazingly, nobody has done that.

What's the saying about "find out why the fence is there before you tear it down"?

Most journals are not "high quality.

Who cares about most journals? Nobody reads them anyways. I'm talking Nature, Science, etc.

Absolutely not and there are plenty of examples. If I buy land and find oil underneath, it's zero effort for me to rake in the dollars. If I come up with a super complex device that takes me 1 year to build, the price is zero if no one wants it.

Price is driven by supply and demand.

You should know they are sometimes called "Tabloid journals" for a reason. Actual 'high-quality' or 'flagship' journals are most the most part unknown outside their discipline.

So how is it that they are entitled to be payed for something they didn't create or even own for that matter? Maybe if they did actually offered an added value service, then the freebie version would be inferior and would be no need to block them from being distributed, since people would just pick their own enhanced (curated?) versions.

As far as I understand it, Elsevier should only have a say on content they actually own the copyright for, which could be a lot of papers, but if I understand correctly SciHub was publishing papers that were funded with public money, is it not? or are they also hosting papers for which the copyright is actually owned by someone else?

Publishers work is not needed, it can be distributed among authors who can do it at a negligible cost.

Imagine if publishers went and banned libraries, because only those who can afford books should be allowed to read them.

Imagine a pirating service which ensures that a given file is only being consumed by one machine at a time. So if I want to watch the newest blockbuster, I have to wait my turn, and once watched, I cannot watch it again (without getting in line). In effect, the movie is checked out a single instance at a time, just like how a library checks out a single book at a time.

IANAL but I'm honestly not even certain that the piracy service you describe would actually be illegal, or at least that it couldn't be done legally.

I use Sci-Hub all the time. I can access all papers via my library subscriptions so I actually DO have paid access to everything, but searching with and authenticating against my university library's services is slow and tedious and not feasible if I want to download many papers quickly.

Reading what Elsevier have to say, you'd think they're either completely delusional (I doubt so), or know full well that they're rapidly becoming irrelevant/abhorred and are adopting a bully position, all the while pretending to be innocent and blameless victims of this situation.

Don't count on me to shed a tear when Elsevier go under.

"Science is better and more accurate when it's inclusive." (https://twitter.com/ElsevierConnect/status/72821552586887578...)

I realize this is about gender, but I can't help but feel a bit of irony in there...

I've read here on HN and elsewhere multiple times, that most of the work done is outsourced to third party labor, which is done essentially for free:

- writing papers

- organising reviews

- reviewing papers

That was 4-6 people full time and my entire floor of 80 people was full of projects like that - projects you never heard of.

The weird thing is that everyone I worked with directly was very smart, and went on to do cool stuff.

Summary: If I had to guess the remaining profit is wasted on silly projects and high manager salaries.

Someone else would just need to write a small script that copied it into the system's host file - but make it generic enough that it works for anything. That would help non-technical users.

This would stop courts from going after centralised name servers.

There really needs to be a way of decentralising name servers.

P.S. This dht-based P2P dns project might interest you. https://github.com/mwarning/KadNode

I notice there is Tahoe lafs...

https://www.tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs

I might disagree with the law. I might break it intentionally, but I do my due diligence and do it knowingly.

When i get caught I hold up my hands and face the consequences because I entered into that knowingly. I have actually done this irl. This is why I have no respect for this, or for Uber, Aaron Schwartz or this entire ridiculous movement of subversion instead of facing up to the challenge and taking it extremely seriously and tackling it up front and openly with some pride and courage.

I'm glad people are fighting to keep this alive anyway. That imo is part of the right approach, to defeat the law by showing its futility in the face of reality when it is very far into the wrong. But ffs, don't hide from what you have done like some kind of child. Face up to your responsiblity and take it on the chin... and let people be angry about that, because that is an actual, serious wrong.

"Words are wind."

  echo "93.174.95.27  elsevier.com" >> /etc/hosts

  javascript:window.location='http://sci-hub.bz/'+window.location

https://www.gnunet.org/gns

Are there full/partial mirrors published anywhere?

As you can see here, they have three mirrors. One Moscow, one Ocean(ia?), and one Cyber(ia?). Libgen also has a mirror.

As for BookSC, they seem to be quite a bit out of date, or something.

It will also push companies to keep research more private and proprietary. Why would I spend millions of dollars on research, only to have it freely distributed to everyone, including my potential competitors?

I've never witnesses a time where more people fight to give up more and more of their own power and hand it over to governments and large corporations on a silver platter...and then complain when it's all gone.

Typically not large royalties, but they are collecting them.

Yeah that behaviour is detestable. Absolutely utterly unethical and everyone who engages in this type of behaviour should take a long look in the mirror and realize that there's an Evil person looking back.

I've lost so much money to f*ckers like this and I have no recourse, it makes me so mad I can spit.

They could make a ton of money doing it this way: Physics textbooks can sell for hundreds. But many don't.

Using your own book for a course(separate from the money) has its benefits: The book has exactly the content that you want to teach off of, and you can also choose good problems.

When I took a Differential Geometry course in college, the professor had a translated version of some paper from a Russian mathematician back in the 1950s that he taught off of. It was cheaper to get copies from Kinko's, and it's not like the math changes. The old pioneers can sometimes give better intuition too.