There is also an important difference: media piracy can have a somewhat negative image in the eyes of the public, but pirating scientific papers does not. If academic publishers attract too much attention with a lawsuit, and more people understand their revenue model, I doubt that the public would be on their side. So maybe this encourages them to be more cautious.
In fact, Sci-Hub is not a real threat to academic publishers as long as universities do not cancel their subscriptions because of it. Of course, many universities probably won't want to tell their researchers to just use Sci-Hub (because of legal concerns, and because it could disappear the next day). So leaving Sci-Hub mostly alone may well be a deliberate decision from academic publishers.
> as long as universities do not cancel their subscriptions because of it
I think parties like Elsevier really don't like sci-hub, I can imagine some people / organizations will opt to not pay for Elsevier because of it. Just like how people would opt to not go to the cinema because they've pirated the movie already.
The main thing IMO is that more people will agree to "knowledge should be free" than "movies should be free", the former is human advancement, the latter is entertainment.
> "Just like how people would opt to not go to the cinema because they've pirated the film already."
Overall movie attendances are down slightly and can largely be explained by other factors than piracy (ticket prices, confectionery prices, saturated market, movie quality, movie series (Rocky 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ... 9999), etc).
Piracy is a grey area in terms of negative impact, especially in the area of entertainment. Company bosses like to see every instance of piracy as a loss of a ticket sale, but in reality it is far more nuanced than that. In some cases, arguably, film piracy can be a positive effect, in other cases there is no guarantee that the type of person that pirates heavily is the type of person who would pay to see a film in the first place. I can go on, but sufficient to say it is a complicated issue.
Disclaimer: I am in no way encouraging piracy or supporting it, but neither do I think it is nearly as evil as often depicted.
The entities actually paying Elsevier are mostly college libraries (not individuals). Though librarians tend to be pro open access, college legal counsel is unlikely to let them tell professors/students to use a pirate site (and many of them would not be comfortable doing so, despite not loving companies like Elsevier). And the most vocal professors unfortunately tend to care more about getting the articles they want/need than about promoting knowledge freedom. Therefore, libraries tend to continue paying for those articles to the extent their budgets allow.
I just asked my brother if he can access scihub via his university's network. He checked and said he can.
He told me his lecturer told all the students about scihub, and they should use it if they can't access a paper via the university's resources. But the university itself is not allowed to use scihub.
You should also try use AARRC.info . It is a full-fledged web service with multiple access techniques to flagship academic papers (Elsevier, IEEE, etc) using a solid browser extension. It is also a free service.
Universities, like most other schools in general, maintain huge block-lists and heuristic filters for things like piracy, porn, malware, and anything else they deem to be unacceptable uses of their networks.
Kind of ironic that the official forefront of education is also the foremost consumer of censorship tools but I think the concerned parents are still winning on this one.
I would begin by
a) Naming and shaming your university. That decision is clearly counter to the goals of higher education
b) Considering moving to another university. If this one censors access to educational material, what else aren't they telling you?
At this point, the media companies would've gone through the courts to either have the .io registrars take away their domain name - like they've done repeatedly with various torrent sites - or have ISPs in many countries block the domain by name. Whether they're based in Russia is irrelevant to that.
Sure, that could happen. But hosting from Russia will likely protect them. And they can use other domain names, and Tor onions. But they can't travel outside Russia, for fear of arrest. As it went down for BTC-e.
You can always get around the block no matter what, but if the goal is to ensure that as few people as possible use Sci-Hub, using the court systems that exist to have its domains seized and/or blocked would be a first step. Requiring that people use a proxy or Tor to access the site increases the barrier to entry significantly from where it is now.
