I have a hunch that the downfall of the "Plato" real-time downloader wasn't the Indian court case but rather the fact that it helped publishers trivially identify the university accounts through which the downloads were happening. Even if the appearance of papers were delayed by a random number of days, there are other pitfalls now, and most importantly, publishers started caring. In particular, Elsevier now slaps UUIDs onto all PDFs you download from them, and no, I'm not just talking of visible watermarks. Other publishers seem to be doing similar things (there was a recent twitter thread on this, retweeted by @textfiles, which I can't find). The rational solution for Sci-Hub seems to be to buffer their uploads and release them in yearly batches, maybe programmatically removing various kinds of watermarks and diffing against the same paper downloaded from a second IP. If this is what they are doing, I'm not surprised. Not sure how much of a winning strategy they have in the long run, though.

Guys: post your papers on the arXiv.

This might be the twitter thread you’re referring to? https://twitter.com/json_dirs/status/1486120144141123584

HN thread from 18 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30082138.

Yep, thank you!

> I also don't understand why the Indian court case has any impact on new article availability. The owner is not Indian. The servers and domains are not Indian.

Because Sci-Hub has a good chance of winning the case. The court in question has previously backed a very broad definition of what constitutes fair dealing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Rame...

> Because Sci-Hub has a good chance of winning the case.

I understand that this is the party line that is parroted whenever this issue comes up, but it does not make any sense as a rationale for keeping new articles off the site. How is not adding any new articles (but, for example, keeping old articles accessible) assisting the possible winning of the case? And more to the point, why does it matter at all if it wins or loses the case? As stated, neither the owner or the infrastructure is Indian, so of what relevancy is this jurisdiction?

And further still, the case appears to have been delayed indefinitely. That last update claims that there was going to be an update a few days ago, but there was not. The proceedings are just now a list of one postponement after another [1]. Given that new articles are being held hostage, it thus very obviously benefits the legal system and the prosecution to continue to delay the case indefinitely.

[1] https://delhihighcourt.nic.in/dhc_case_status_oj_list.asp?pn...

The owner might not be Indian, but she's actively defending the case(through lawyers) in India. Not following the injunction would lead her to losing the case, which is why she followed through. She didn't have to fight the case in India, but she chose to. Why keep old papers and stop adding new papers - that probably depends on the terms of the injunction.

> Why keep old papers and stop adding new papers - that probably depends on the terms of the injunction.

As per the official tweet that has already been mentioned in this thread [1]:

> how about the lawsuit in India you may ask: our lawyers say that restriction is expired already

So according to the owner's official Twitter, this is no longer a valid reason, and yet new papers are still not accessible. Why is that?

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/ringo_ring/status/143435621720862...

Haven't got around to adding yet?

That is not how scihub used to function. Scihub used to have an engine, named Plato, which would fetch papers automatically if not already in their database. For the last year now, this essential service has not been operational. This is what the issue I am raising is about.

> this essential service

Give man a fish and he will praise you for a day. Give man a spinning and he will bitch at you because it is not a fish.

It's clear what you're talking about. Software bitrots over time. Plato might need fixes, might have a huge backlog, lots of stuff can happen.

I still have airgapped windows xp systems with one software package on them to do one job. Left alone Software doesn’t bit rot, it is the never ending stream of updates that cause it to cease working over time.

Think about it. Software like Plato downloads papers from around the web. If the environment around software (i.e the web) changes, software without updates bitrots.