[open-science] UK text mining exception: sci-hub

Sat Jul 9 13:21:47 UTC 2016

Yes, Peter’s post is a more complete take than my reply. You have to contend with not just copyright but many other laws as well. Just accessing a torrent may be illegal in your country.

Imagine I’ve left my suitcase in your house, and your house is locked. The suitcase is mine, but can I break your lock to get at my suitcase? I have a legal right to my suitcase, but breaking the lock on your house to grab my suitcase is certainly not legal. Two different laws to watch out for.

Note that running or accessing a torrent itself maybe illegal, or it may not. A torrent service for sharing large amounts of public domain fish data may actually be a fabulous service for science. Oh look what I found !  http://academictorrents.com/browse.php?cat=6

> On Jul 9, 2016, at 9:11 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Sat, Jul 9, 2016 at 1:27 PM, Jackson da Silva Medeiros <jackson.medeiros at ufrgs.br> wrote:
> Let me put my 50 cents problematization: So, if I have cable TV, and I pay for that, and I like to watch Simpsons at night... But, I got a dinner with friends and, DAMN IT!, I lost the best Simpsons episode ever... If I get home and download the episode from a torrent, am I a lawbreaker?
> 
>  
> Just curiosity by analogy.
> 
> 
> Analogy does not work in the law. You have to know the law, not guess what it ought to be.
>  
> Unfortunately copyright is not the only law that we must be aware of. There are also laws which forbid crawling and the circumvention of Technical Prevention Measures (e.g. DRM) such as CFAA:
> https://www.eff.org/issues/cfaa
> 
> "The CFAA is the federal anti-hacking law. Among other things, this law makes it illegal to intentionally access a computer without authorization or in excess of authorization; however, the law does not explain what "without authorization" actually means. The statute does attempt to define "exceeds authorized access," but the meaning of that phrase has been subject to considerable dispute. While the CFAA is primarily a criminal law intended to reduce the instances of malicious hacking, a 1994 amendment to the bill allows for civil actions to be brought under the statute.
> "
> 
> for particularly problematic cases see
> https://socialmediacollective.org/2016/07/01/why-i-am-suing-the-government/
> 
> which includes 
> "
> The CFAA has been used to indict a MySpace user for adding false information to her profile, to convict a non-programmer of “hacking,” to convict an IT administrator of deleting files he was authorized to access, and to send a dozen FBI agents to the house of a computer security researcher with their guns drawn.
> "
> and
> Yet federal charges were brought against someone who was downloading publicly available Web pages.
> 
> It is very unclear what falls under the law and it's probably determined to a large degree by the efforts of the various lawyers in the case.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Peter Murray-Rust
> Reader in Molecular Informatics
> Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
> University of Cambridge
> CB2 1EW, UK
> +44-1223-763069
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