[anthropodie]

Suppose SciHub looses cases in multiple countries and has to shutdown. What prevents someone from putting entire data as torrent?

Piracy is result of unfair prices. Music used to be pirated all the time but then Spotify came along with subscription based services. I don't know anyone who still pirates music. Maybe people with IP and copyright claims should learn from Music industry.

[caslon]

Shutting down isn't actually on the table here. In the best case, she wins. In the worst case, she goes back to her post-USSR nation that doesn't really care about international copyright law and continues to ignore international copyright law.

[jhgb]

> What prevents someone from putting entire data as torrent?

What do you mean by that? It's already a bunch of torrents on the official SciHub page.

[pradn]

Yes, these torrents hold hundreds or thousands of articles each. You can help preserve them by downloading and seeding them.

[xrisk]

Can you point me to these torrents please? I can’t seem to find them.

[sampo]

https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/7084/bulk-downl...

[jhgb]

If you look at https://libgen.rs/scimag/, on the top left, there's Download -> Torrents.

[adamc]

I am not convinced music prices were "unfair" -- they were higher than people wanted to pay. There is a distinction.

[scns]

Hm, unfair to whom. Do you know how much the artists actually receive?

There are clauses from the days of shipping vinyl to record stores, regarding breakage of disks. The label keeps a percentage (5% - 10% can't remember correctly), for broken disks. They still use these clauses decades after they have <edit>lost</edit> any basis in reality.

The Police financed the recordings themselves, to get higher royalty percentages.

Have you read about majors suing artists for damages after their albums flopped?

How much do the people earn that made the music in the first place? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/19/zoe-keati...

https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2019/12/06/zoe-keating-spot...

Further reading here, published 21 years ago: https://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/

[danuker]

What is a fair price? There is no such thing.

An economically optimal price is one that maximizes total profit.

If it's too high, fewer people will buy the product, which might reduce profit. If it's too low, the profit margin will be small in spite of lots of units sold.

[JumpCrisscross]

> What is a fair price? There is no such thing

It's subjective, but that doesn't make it nonexistent. I pay $10/mo. for Spotify. I'm happy with that. I think I get great value for that money spent. If someone came out with an $8/month streaming service, I'd scrutinize it fairly closely before contemplating switching.

[pessimizer]

Are you actually saying that you would refuse to use a service (all other things being equal) that was $8/month because $10/month is what you think is "fair?"

If so, I'd mark that behavior as strange, and not actually evidence of the existence of a "fair price." There's no way this behavior is typical.

If what you're saying is that you'd assume a price lower than $10/month would have other, unseen problems, then:

1) You're not referring to a "fair price" but instead a believable price, which is a compromise between what you want to pay (which is nothing) and what you estimate to be the price of delivery, and the odds with that price in mind that what you receive will be adulterated/lower-quality than advertised.

2) How is $10/month fair? No wonder musicians don't make any money.

[dragonwriter]

> It's subjective, but that doesn't make it nonexistent.

Yes, it does. Subjective assessments have no objective reality.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Subjective assessments have no objective reality

Subjective assessments drive political preferences and policy, to say nothing of human relations and experiences.

[dragonwriter]

Hallicinations of the expressed wishes of divine figures do that, too.

Still doesn't make those figures, or their wishes, real. Beliefs about fair prices exist, fair prices themselves do not.

[slaymaker1907]

Only if you assume humans are purely self centered rational agents. In practice, many people do care about what a "fair" price is and don't just charge as much as possible in pursuit of profit.

[belltaco]

We are talking about music, not insulin. There's probably hundreds of millions of different songs including the ability to listen for free on radio with ads, YT etc.

[adamc]

This is an absurdly limited point of view. If I charge 3x as much as other vendors, then force them to raise their prices by firebombing businesses that don't comply, it might (conceivably) maximize profit, but most people would think it unfair, largely because it was founded on unfair restraint of trade.

I don't think the prices on music were unfair before. No one has to have music, and there was no evidence that the prices were enforced by unfair practices. They were just higher than people wanted to pay.

But most people would say that Enron's manipulation of energy markets was quite unfair.

[nybble41]

> there was no evidence that the prices were enforced by unfair practices

Copyright is the unfair practice at work here enforcing high prices for distribution of information, a service which can be provided at practically zero cost when not restrained by force.

[dqpb]

> An economically optimal price is one that maximizes total profit.

The economically optimal price is the one that maximizes total value in the long run.

[danuker]

> maximizes total value in the long run.

What value? Units sold/quantity of product? If so, should businesses operate at breakeven in the long run?

This is an interesting take, it is optimal for everyone, not just the producers. I agree that this would be the ideal scenario for society.

The problem is - how to arrive at it?

Profit sends a message that offering X instead of Y is more profitable - and therefore, better use of one's time.

How would you reduce/remove profit without destroying incentives to innovate or even pivot to new industries?

[kbad1000]

Yes, but it depends if the goods or service is essential. Is knowledge/ education/ access to information essential?

[xtracto]

MP3 art shared by napster is different from Knowledge shared by SciHub in that the former was financed privately by record companies while the latter is funded by state taxes (i.e. public money).

At the current state of affairs, Scientific Publishers can be reduced as "curators" of public research publications. They may work very well at that (i.e. reading something from Nature, or from JAMA has its prestige) but there is no reason why they should gate the knowledge behind paywalls. They should offer their "curation/selection" services, dedicated to create lists/collections of scientific articles already published elsewhere for free.

[creamynebula]

Pirating music remains lively on the private tracker scene

[yashwastaken]

But pirating music is different from streaming it on some application. Like you don't own the music file you're just streaming it from some servers(in case of downloading you still need the app and can't share it to some other device).

[martin_a]

I don't think that matters.

Everybody had a bunch (or thousands) of MP3s because mobile phones weren't a thing, fast mobile connections weren't a thing and there was simply no infrastructure to have something like Spotify.

If we'd have Spotify with everything in 2003, we would not swap hard drives in school breaks.

[jazzyjackson]

I was a subscriber to “Yahoo music unlimited” in 2005 and transferred my DRM’d WMA files to a zen micro with a 4GB spinning disc.

granted, i never met anyone else at school doing the same thing.