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December 2020
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Elsevier Wants To Stop Indian Medics, Students And Academics Accessing Knowledge The Only Way Most Of Them Can Afford: Via Sci-Hub And Libgen

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Last month Techdirt wrote about some ridiculous scaremongering from Elsevier against Sci-Hub, which the publisher claimed was a "security risk". Sci-Hub, with its 85 million academic papers, is an example of what are sometimes termed "shadow libraries". For many people around the world, especially in developing countries, such shadow libraries are very often the only way medics, students and academics can access journals whose elevated Western-level subscription prices are simply unaffordable for them. That fact makes a new attack by Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen shadow library particularly troubling. The Indian title The Wire has the details:

the publishing giants are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen be completely blocked in India through a so-called dynamic injunction. The publishers claim that they own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published, and that Sci-Hub and Libgen are engaged in violating various exclusive rights conferred on them under copyright law by providing free access to their copyrighted contents.
Techdirt readers will note the outrageous claim there: that these publishers "own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published". That's only true in the sense that most publishers force academics to hand over the copyright as a condition of being published. The publishers don't pay for that copyright, and contribute almost nothing to the final published paper save a little editing and formatting: manuscript review is carried out for free by other academics. And yet the publishers are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen should be blocked in India on this basis. Moreover, they want a "dynamic injunction":
That is, once a defendant's website is categorised as a "rogue website", the plaintiff won't have to go back to the judges to have any new domains blocked for sharing the same materials, and can simply get the injunction order extended with a request to the court's deputy registrar.
The legal action by publishers against shadow libraries is part of a broader offensive around the world, but there's a reason why they may face extra challenges in India -- over and above the fact that Sci-Hub and Libgen contain huge quantities of material that can unambiguously be shared quite legally. As Techdirt reported back in 2013, a group of Western publishers sued Delhi University over photocopied versions of academic textbooks. For many students in India, this was the only way they could afford such educational materials. In 2016, the Indian court ruled that "copyright is not an inevitable, divine, or natural right", and that photocopying textbooks is fair use.The parallels with the new suit against Sci-Hub and Libgen are clear. The latter are digital photocopy sites: they make available copies of educational material to students and researchers who could not otherwise afford access to this knowledge. The copies made by Sci-Hub and Libgen should be seen for what they are: fair use of material that was in any case largely created using public funds for the betterment of humanity, not to boost the bottom line of publishers with profit margins of 35-40%.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

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posted at: 12:01am on 29-Dec-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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Content Moderation Case Study: Profanity Filter Causes Problems At Paleontology Conference (October 2020)

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Summary: With the COVID pandemic still in full force, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology moved its annual meeting online. The event was due to run for an entire week, but early issues caused attendees and moderators to question the contents of the pre-packaged content filter provided by Convey Services, which operated the virtual meeting software.The effort to ensure followup Q&A sessions would be free of profanity and other disruptiveness went awry when terms commonly used by paleontologists got caught in the software's filter. While words like "pubic," "bone," or "hell" might be appropriately blocked elsewhere, the blocklisting of these words disrupted the conference the software was supposed to keep from being disrupted.

I would hope that actual swears or slurs would be censored, since paleontology is not a field that's immune to racist/sexist jerks, noted Brigid Christison, a masters' student in biology at Carleton University, in an email.[...]Words like 'bone,' 'pubic,' and 'stream' are frankly ridiculous to ban in a field where we regularly find pubic bones in streams, Christison said.
More problematically, attendees noted the software blocked "Wang" but left "Johnson" intact, despite both being sexual slang. This appeared to indicate some bias on the part of Convey's blocklist creators -- a bias that effectively erased a surname belonging to more than 90 million Chinese citizens.Decisions to be made by Convey:
  • Are generic ban lists effective enough in most situations to justify less content-specific alterations during more specialized use?
  • Given the global reach of the internet, is it still acceptable to block common surnames that can also be deployed as sexual slang?
  • Does providing separate keyword sets for different uses reduce the profitability of software sales and licenses?
Questions and policy implications to consider:
  • Do word ban lists raise many issues in more general use or are problems noticed more often when the software is deployed by entities that deal with specialized subject matter?
  • Does allowing licensees to alter keywords as needed eliminate some of the problems caused by non-specific ban lists?
  • Is shifting the cost of moderation to customers a solid business decision?
Resolution: The Society was able to alter the ban list to better fit the subject matter once the problem was noticed. It continued to edit the keywords provided by Convey, reducing the probability of overblocking as the week rolled on. Because the alterations could be made on the client side, disruption was minimal, if inadvertently comical.Originally posted to the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

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posted at: 12:01am on 29-Dec-2020
path: /Policy | permalink | edit (requires password)

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