Elsevier and Wiley have a lot of lawyers who are likely arguing that leaving it up is condoning copyright infringement. There’s a long history of threats for anything related to targets of these lawsuits, and other companies taking something offline quickly to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

Hopefully with Dems in control we will see these companies punished for their bad behavior. Or at least laws passed that make the publication of research more open.

The science should be funded and free. The applications of the science are where the money is to be made.

These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era. It's time for them to fail and die off naturally. But it will probably take legislation to do so. And I for one can't wait to see them gone.

Democrats are politicians with listed policies, not faeries that grant wishes because you happen to be more aligned with them. Elimination of copyright isn't on their to-do list.

Who said anything about elimination of copyright? Who said I was more aligned with 'them' ?

Most scientific research is funded with grants and by universities with billion dollar endowments. They are not struggling.

You should not make money on the deaths of others because you think it's more important to charge for the knowledge that can save them.

I'm in medical. Some of these papers are life saving. Please don't discount how valuable that science is to humanity as a whole.

This is not about companies making profit. This is about science and the freedom of information. Data wants to be free and it should be.

"Data wants to be free and should be" has been the rallying cry of software pirates since I've been in high school. It might have struck a nerve in a group of people who make money off of the sale of software.

I'm not discounting how valuable open research is to society as a whole. I'm not even arguing that, as a moral right, the research should be freely available! I'm just not seeing a technical path there that doesn't retroactively unassign publishing rights to all past papers. And I don't see how a change in political administration makes it any easier to convince rich people to give up money.

I'm not even convinced the government should take action here - CS work is done on arxiv, so it's not even as if Elsevier provides a useful service in distribution. Why are authors continuing to publish in Nature when they could put a PDF up anywhere? that's what we need to address.

> Or at least laws passed that make the publication of research more open.

Sci-hub was created under Obama, I don't remember neither him nor the party making anything to help them, quite the opposite actually: Elbakyan has been judged in absentia and sentenced twice under his presidency. Were she to put the foot on Western soil, she would pay it dearly thanks to this.

Obama failed in this regard. But Obama does not represent all dems. Nor does Obama represent Dems in 2021.

There are no precedents in the Democrats history of exercise of power that would let us hope that Obamas's VP would lead a radically different policy.

The Obama AG killed Aaron Swartz.

>>Hopefully with Dems in control we will see these companies punished for their bad behavior. Or at least laws passed that make the publication of research more open.

"Yeah, meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."

You write like someone who's never heard of "regulatory capture."

You write like someone who's a cynic.

>>You write like someone who's a cynic.

Guilty but history is on my side.

> These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era.

I personally believe this is wishful thinking (similarly when I read about how companies have "outdated business models"). Publishers sell prestigue and attention, and this can't easily be replicated, nor is it unnecessary. The increase in research papers makes them even more valueable in my eyes.

This is despite me wanting to see many changes to publishing and science distribution.

edit: removed part that I deemed unecessarily hostile.

I think data wants to be free. Charge for the applications not the data. Data should be free.

This saves lives. I think we can all agree there are certain things that are a benefit to humanity and we should place these things over profits.

These companies are less valuable than they appear IMHO. These gatekeepers of knowledge. More like stonewallers.

Like how the opioid crisis was handled.. democrats and Republicans are exactly the same thing. American politics is WWE with old people in formal clothes..

I couldn't agree more. However there are voices at the fringes getting much much louder on both sides who are definitely not the same thing.

> Hopefully with Dems in control we will see these companies punished for their bad behavior.

There's optimism, and then there is naiveté.

Yes there's also people who think they always know better.

The Democrats are on Big Media's side even more so than the Republicans. Hoping that they're going to switch sides and "punish" big copyright and Media owners for their IP trolling and abuse is just wishful thinking.

Not all dems.

We all know what we got with the Republicans last 4 years. Let's see what changed on the other side of the aisle if anything.

> Not all dems.

I know that we're not supposed to be snarky here at HN, but I'm failing to see how #NotAllDems is a sensible argument. Especially given President-Elect Biden's track record on this particular issue, and Vice-President-Elect Harris' history as a "hardline", "tough on crime" prosecutor.

> These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era.

Elsevier is a very diverse company with a lot of product offerings that are not antiquated. People here tend to just think of them as a journal publication company, but they are much more than that. The company sells (through subsidiaries) a lot of IT products to governments and law enforcement around the world.

They, as a small example, offer a service that allow LEO to perform comprehensive background & arrest record checks on individuals in custody.

Then Elsevier should be just fine when it loses this part of its business.

"That part of the business" is still a huge portfolio of product offerings in-and-around the scientific publishing space. If you cut one head of the hydra, another will just grow back in its place.

The company came to be so dominant because their strategy of vertical integration is effective and repeatable. Identify a market of valuable information; build tools to collect & collate that information; build tools for searching through the information; build tools for adding annotations or otherwise improving the value of the information; build tools to enable people to provide information directly through the platform.

They've basically repeated this pattern for science, medicine, legal, and insurance industries. So much so that it's really impossible to pry them out of a space because they get so tightly integrated that they actually become indistinguishable from the market.

I'm not favoring reed elsevier here, just pointing out that their dominance is very well established and isn't going to be easy to bring them down.

Excellent breakdown. Thank you. Yes as I've said only legislation will end this tyranny.

To guard this data to the point they were willing to throw Aaron Swartz in jail for 35 years is beyond reprehensible. It's simply abhorrent the way they have acted as gatekeepers to this kind of knowledge.

They are responsible for slowing things down. Not speeding them up. These gatekeepers are holding us back. Lives could be saved. Millions of them. This data is a benefit to humanity as a whole and it should be treated as such.

Biden has been very comfy as a senator with the expansive IP claims made by Hollywood. I think he is going to be something of a disappointment to you.

That's unfortunate. Good thing he's really old with not much time left. Not that I wish him harm. He's certainly better than a lot of alternatives.

We can only guess their motivations and who pulls their (Twitter's) strings behind the scenes. I am not sure that most of us here will ever find out.

> We can only guess their motivations

I don't understand this perspective, but I guess my own is built from experience. We can never know exactly what Twitter discussed internally before taking this action, but there is lots of external evidence and signals as to what happened. It's unlikely to be different from the action taken by most other corporations with legal teams.

Small organizations with outside counsel can surprise us with their decisions since there are more concentrated opinions and higher risk taking. Perhaps GitHub and youtube-dl is the only outcome that has surprised me recently.

And even if we do, we will never know for sure.

And even if we knew, we can never talk about it.

Twitter says they did it "due to a violation of Twitter policies, in particular the Counterfeiting Policy."

The precipitating event was a lawsuit in India and the subsequent reactions.

This article gives more details: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-bans-sci-hub/

Liability and risk management. As soon as a lawyer becomes aware of a situation where an individual is using the service they are required to act to mitigate risk. There is no obligation for anyone to have access to a private service and they'll be weighing factors which include what 3rd parties might do.

In this case it seems that they would have considered the actions of the companies running the paywalls. How likely would they be to take legal action (not all of which is public) against Twitter? Fairly likely, if they feel that Twitter is helping to publicize the service they want to take down.

This is both in the legal and financial interest of Twitter. There is no real blow back from kicking off this person and their service versus dealing with US corporations. Copyright law changes and the impact of court decisions likely play a factor too. I find it hard to believe that some court somewhere, hasn't held Twitter (or similar service) liable for indirect copyright damages (that is likely being appealed.)