Tag: EFF

EFF to Honor Scientific Paper Pirate Sci-Hub

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) announced that among the 2023 recipients of the EFF Award (formerly the Pioneer Award), it will honor Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Asanova Elbakyan this September. The Russian-based Sci-Hub is an enterprise-scale pirate site specifically built to host scientific papers about which the EFF states:

Through Sci-Hub, Elbakyan has strived to shatter academic publishing’s monopoly-like mechanisms in which publishers charge high prices even though authors of articles in academic journals receive no payment. She has been targeted by many lawsuits and government actions, and Sci-Hub is blocked in some countries, yet she still stands tall for the idea that restricting access to information and knowledge violates human rights. 

In addition to the EFF’s usual flare for the dramatic, the organization continues to flaunt its unwavering hostility toward all copyright rights as a foundational raison d’etre. Note the word shatter in that quote above. To the ideologues at EFF et al., Sci-Hub is not merely a response to subscription fees but should be revered for its assault on the very idea that journal publishers ought to exist in the first place. In fact, the timing of this award is telling in that it comes two years after a landmark, open access agreement was negotiated by the University of California (UC) with publishing giant Elsevier.

Although subscription cost has often been a point of contention for many in the academic community, even contributing authors, the UC has been negotiating open access agreements with academic publishers on behalf of colleagues at smaller institutions with more limited resources. “We refer to these agreements as transformative open access agreements because they convert subscription payments into payments for open access publishing (with reading provided for free). It is a new approach we helped develop with other leading institutions a few years ago, in large part through the OA2020 initiative,” says librarian and economics professor Jeffrey MacKie-Mason of UC Berkeley.

Settled in March of 2021, the Elsevier deal was the ninth open access agreement the UC negotiated with academic publishers, which suggests that many authors of scientific research papers do not view a pirate site like Sci-Hub as a viable “solution” to whatever criticisms they have of the commercial publishers. While I do not presume to have expertise about the complex world of scientific journal publishing, a 2018 article by industry consultant Kent Andersen lists “102 things journal publishers do,” and it’s a lot more than hosting PDFs on a website. Notably, even among some of the critical comments on that article, which appear to be written by academic authors, there is no mention of Sci-Hub in particular, or piracy in general, as obviating the role played by journal publishers in the industry.

Although it is true (as the EFF emphasizes) that the authors of these papers are not paid for their writing, the academic publisher is more like a venue operator than a trade book publisher—a venue operator that, at best, serves as a neutral party to control quality. These journals invest substantial resources to review millions of submissions, prepare documents, maintain databases, check for plagiarism, organize peer review, etc. And although these investments need to be recovered profitably for the publisher to exist, the UC deals indicate that there is room for negotiation, which leaves EFF’s panegyric to Sci-Hub sounding as hollow as it is untimely.

Speaking of timing, with academics, policymakers, journalists, artists, and just about everyone else wondering how badly generative AI might exacerbate the misinformation problem, could there be a worse moment to award a pirate of scientific journals? How is Sci-Hub not the natural place for a generative AI developer to harvest scientific writing to train an algorithm to, perhaps, “write” papers without scientists? Notably, in the class-action case Tremblay et al. v. OpenAI, the plaintiffs allege that the defendant obtained literary works for machine learning (ML) from “shadow libraries,” (i.e., pirate sites like Z-Library). So, by the same logic, Sci-Hub would seem to be a natural source where an AI developer can scrape scientific papers.

I am neither motivated nor qualified to critique the entire scientific publishing ecosystem, let alone to dispute complaints among some academics about cost, et al. I would grant Elbakyan the benefit of the doubt that her intent is at least distinguishable from the typical entertainment media pirate whose only motive is financial, and I recognize that scientists and academics in various regions have access Sci-Hub for what may be difficult to obtain information. Nevertheless, the worn out view that piracy is a solution to imperfections in a given system is, at best, narrowly focused on distribution while ignoring the means and motives for production.

Not unlike Peter Sunde’s mourning the lost Marxist idealism he saw in the The Pirate Bay, Elbakyan echoed this same naivete when she told the Washington Post in 2016, “On my website, any person can read as many papers as they want for free, and sending donations is their free will. Why Elsevier cannot work like this, I wonder?” Indeed. The alleged “white hat” pirate never seems to grasp that there is always a cost to production and that, whatever system covers that cost, it won’t be a damn tip jar, and it will rely on copyright in some form. As the court stated in 2015 when Elsevier successfully sued Sci-Hub for infringement, “Elbakyan’s solution to the problems she identifies, simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest.”

As for the EFF Award, it’s worth asking what Sci Hub’s agenda is in 2023, if indeed traditional publishers are adopting open access agreements and academics are still willing to work with those publishers? Is it truly Elbakyan’s mission to “shatter” the entire scientific publishing ecosystem and, with it, essential processes like peer review? Or is that just the EFF’s hyperbole? Presumably, it’s both. And by honoring Sci-Hub, the EFF proves once again that it will promote any anti-copyright agenda—legal or otherwise—with the zeal of a conspiracy theorist watching “chemtrails” fill the sky.

Tedious Anti-Copyright Stance of EFF is Not About Protecting Anyone

Welp (as the kids say), it looks like Katherine Trendacosta of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found an old PowerPoint deck from 2012 and used it to write a new post ominously titled Hollywood’s Insistence on New Draconian Copyright Rules Is Not About Protecting Artists.

Typical of the EFF playbook, Trendacosta devotes an entire post maligning the motion picture industry rather than address the “rule” (the SMART Act), which she does not even mention until the final paragraph. At that point, the reader is meant to take her word for it that the proposed legislation is bad because—believe it or not—there is too much diversity and choice in the streaming market, and because film producers want to make money.

Ms. Trendacosta calls streaming a “hellscape” where consumers cannot find what they want and/or where shows and films are canceled or moved to different platforms. She writes, “It’s disingenuous for Hollywood’s lobbyists to claim that they need harsher copyright laws to protect artists when it’s the studios that are busy disappearing the creations of these artists.”

“Hellscape” is a bit dramatic as critiques go, given that market research indicates that 74% of consumers report being satisfied with streaming and that those numbers are currently trending upward. Of course, the anti-copyright playbook Trendacosta is using tells her to imply that when producers make market decisions to stop producing a given work, or to move a work from one channel to another, this is “disappearing” material that should be available in perpetuity. In fact, she inscrutably cites the “disappearance” of a film which is temporarily being made available in a new 4K cinema format and will return to streaming in a matter of months. Hellish, no?

Perhaps Trendacosta is unaware that we are enjoying a new golden age of filmed entertainment available on—or produced especially for—the private screen market. Streaming models have fostered a diverse range of projects that would never have been made, let alone been sustainable, in the narrower distribution paradigms pre-Netflix. But a reality of all this bounty is that more experimentation and risk-taking means that a higher volume of material will be canceled or redistributed more frequently as audiences respond to what gets made. That’s just the business of making entertainment media, and the EFF always acts as if the business is what makes efforts to mitigate piracy somehow dishonest or sinister.

Here, Trendacosta digs a little deeper into the big box of EFF’s toys and argues that ordinary tensions that arise among studios and talent—including strikes and financial disagreements—are evidence that the parties seeking remedies to piracy “don’t care about artists.” True to form, the folks at EFF pretend to care about artists by erecting a false dichotomy between the creators who work on projects and Hollywood, where “Hollywood” is a generic term to describe a monolith that does not exist.

It’s a very strange argument because the artists to which Trendacosta refers in those strikes, etc., want money, too. In fact, money is often exactly why they have disagreements with certain producers or studios. Yet, Trendacosta elides the fact that piracy hurts everyone in the ecosystem, regardless of their internal disputes and negotiations with one another. That’s why unions like DGA, WGA, and IATSE are members of the Copyright Alliance and work closely with the studios to fight piracy. It is categorically false to suggest that large studios are the only parties with an interest in this issue. As independent filmmakers and other artists have explained repeatedly, it’s the smaller, independent projects that are most vulnerable to the negative effects of piracy.

And let’s be honest. EFF opposes all copyright enforcement measures in the same style as this post—no substance, just uninformed, ad hominem attacks—and it behaves no differently when smaller groups or indie artists seek copyright remedies in Congress.

So, what is the supposedly “harsh” new piracy remedy that EFF is opposing this time?

The Strengthening Measures to Advance Rights Technologies (SMART) Act is a legislative response to the fact that for more than 25 years, Big Tech has refused to fulfil its side of the bargain struck with the adoption of Section 512 of the DMCA. Simply put, Section 512(i) requires online service providers to collaborate with copyright owners to develop standard technical measures (STM) to identify and expeditiously remove infringing content from internet platforms.

But not only did the development of STM never quite happen, the Googles and Facebooks of the world, who came after the OSPs that negotiated the DMCA, benefitted from mass infringement on their platforms because the DMCA shielded them from liability.

SMART seeks to address more than two decades of stonewalling by adding a new Section 514 to the DMCA that would create new remedies to confront Big Tech’s refusal to adopt appropriate and affordable technical measures to reduce online piracy. At the same time, its proposals would protect smaller and less well-resourced service providers by calling for a variety of tailored and practical technical measures to be developed under a multi-stakeholder process overseen by the Librarian of Congress.

This is what the EFF is calling “draconian”—a proposal to restore the intent of the DMCA as it was enacted in 1998. SMART is the first substantive response to Big Tech’s two big lies: 1) We can’t do it; and 2) We shouldn’t do it because it will chill speech. Those arguments have worn paper thin in recent years given the role these same companies have played in fostering the most toxic, Republic-shaking nonsense ever to be “freely spoken.” But credit where it’s due. At least Ms. Trendacosta didn’t say SOPA.

EFF, Public Knowledge, et al Celebrate Defeat of SOPA/PIPA Out of the Blue

Rumors have come to my attention—okay it was splashed all over Twitter—that an event was held yesterday called The Untold Story of SOPA/PIPA. “Defeating SOPA/PIPA didn’t happen overnight,” says the EFF’s promotional page for the event. “Advocacy groups like Public Knowledge fought long and hard for years to raise the alarms about these censorship efforts.”

Where does one begin? By commenting on the offensive or the pathetic? Perhaps the most poignant and direct offense speaks for itself. Because just this morning, I happened to see the following post by a Facebook musician friend:

So our new album, which was just released Monday and cost us tens of thousands of dollars to make and promote (which was borrowed), is already on “file sharing” sites…

Online piracy, including by foreign actors, even almost a decade since the great defeat of SOPA/PIPA, is still a major problem that still costs thousands of independent creators their livelihoods. But don’t let that spoil the party being thrown by a bunch of ivory-tower “activists,” who were in the trenches in 2011 working their index fingers raw, Tweeting and sharing batshit crazy memes and other disinformation about those bills. Or don’t forget to say a prayer for the digital-age powder monkeys of 4Chan who helped spread the word. And as for investments! Well, what about the money (whose money?) spent on SPAM bots to spread the word that SOPA/PIPA would break the internet? Sock puppets have to eat, too, y’know! (Actually, no I guess they don’t.)

The tragedy is that the real “untold story of SOPA/PIPA” is that the public was lied to about how those bills actually worked; lied to that the bills’ opponents “were all for stopping piracy, but not this way;” and lied to about how organic and grassroots the effort was to defeat the bills.  Does anyone today actually believe it was a coincidence that the Internet Association was founded concurrently with the fight against that legislation, or that Google’s lobbying expenditures went from negligible to record-setting during the same period?

Stop SOPA was one of the most successful and well-funded disinformation campaigns in internet history and, as I have said many times, it scared the hell out of me. And not because of the piracy problem. That was just an unfortunate failure for people like my friend quoted above. No, the scary part about the manner in which the legislation was defeated were the lessons the campaign taught to other powerful institutions. It was clear by the mechanisms employed that anyone with enough money could alter the course of history with a few simple lies and mediocre graphic design. I know, right? What was I thinking? That rampant disinformation might threaten democracy itself? Just my hysterical nature, I guess. Because let’s be clear: SOPA/PIPA was not defeated with information or, heaven forbid, debate in Washington. Those bills were defeated by this:

I come from an advertising and marketing background, and that right there is advertising. Very effective advertising. Plenty of my friends shared memes like this one for weeks leading up to the defeat of SOPA/PIPA. But when advertising is designed to frighten the consumer, it should be confronted with skepticism—critical thinking that social media seems especially well designed to weaken among users. How many of my friends read or had the background to understand the legislation? Almost none.

And, yeah, I know. There were articles written about those bills, too. And you could hardly see the puppet strings of collusion despite the uncanny consistency in the language being used—generalized, ominous, and populist, without bothering to mention that the key mechanisms proposed already existed in the law. Like the tweak to injunctive power against foreign piracy sites, which would not have had any effect on the ordinary function of internet activity. And since 2012, SOPA-like enforcement measures (e.g. site blocking) have been implemented in markets around the world, and still no breaking of the internet has occurred.

But I think the most galling aspect about this sad attempt to relive the glory day of January 18, 2012 (you probably forgot, right?) is that nothing about the Republic-shattering events of the last several years has chastened the “free speech” rhetoric of the EFF, Public Knowledge, Sen. Wyden, et al. That they are still eager to call SOPA/PIPA “censorship bills” with straight faces is astounding. Never mind that piracy is not a form of protected speech; but have these organizations learned nothing since 2016? Did they miss the giant sticky note that says the laissez-faire approach to platform governance has been an abysmal failure worldwide? Specifically, do they lack the introspection to recognize the methodological similarity between …

this …

… and this?

If Russian troll farms didn’t read the Stop SOPA Playbook as the ultimate guide to manipulation through social media, they certainly could have. But, again, don’t let events like the U.S. Capitol assault of January 6th ruin all the self-congratulatory fun being had at EFF and Public Knowledge. Though I do have to ask why March 17, 2021? Why the nine year and two-month anniversary of the defeat of SOPA/PIPA? Odd no? Maybe not. Are EFF and PK trying to send a signal to the IP Subcommittee that if it tries to update the failed notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA, they will unleash Godzilla once again? Can’t say for sure. Maybe they just couldn’t get hold of any St. Patrick’s decorations and decided to have a different kind of party.