Streaming services are starting to look a lot like cable packages.

Ownership of intellectual property rights for a large proportion of the scholarly record is held by publishers, so a majority of journal articles are behind paywalls and unavailable to most people. As a result some readers are encouraged to use pirate websites such as Sci-Hub to access them, a practice that is alternately regarded as criminal and unethical or as a justified act of civil disobedience. This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerrilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge. By doing so, it is shown that piracy is an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape that can render the current intellectual property regime irrelevant. If we wish to actively construct a true scholarly commons, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge towards the creation of an open scholarly communication system that is fit for purpose.

Piracy does not mean lost sales.

In what seems to be inconclusive research work in Warsaw, taking pirated book copies out of the market doesn't appear to mean more legitimate book sales.

In an effort to crack down on unauthorized postings of journal articles, the American Psychological Association is policing the Internet for scientists sharing their own work.

Our free culture anthem gets a fabulous arrangement by Nik Phelps. Vocals by Connie Champagne. Animation and song by Nina Paley.

Subtitles available at: http://www.amara.org/en/videos/60YbX7IivNHF/info/copying-is-not-theft-official-version/

TL;DR Crossref discourages our members from using DOI-like strings or fake DOIs.  Details Recently we have seen quite a bit of debate around the use of so-called “fake-DOIs.” We have also been quoted as saying that we discourage the use of “fake DOIs” or “DOI-like strings”. This post outlines some of the cases in which we’ve seen fake DOIs used and why we recommend against doing so. Using DOI-like strings as internal identifiers Some of our members use DOI-like strings as internal identifiers for their manuscript tracking systems.

Suppose you were a publisher and you wanted to get the goods on a pirate who was downloading your subscription content and giving it away f...

In a lawsuit filed by Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers, Sci-Hub.org is facing millions of dollars in damages. However, the site has no intentions of backing down and will continue its fight to keep access to scientific knowledge free and open. "I think Elsevier's business model is itself illegal," Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan says.

The academic publisher Elsevier last week filed a complaint against two web sites who it accuses of pirating its academic articles and other publications and offering them up to the world for free. Elsevier…

Academic publishing company Elsevier has filed a complaint at a New York District Court, hoping to shut down the Library Genesis project and the Sci-Hub.org search engine. The sites, which are particularly popular in developing nations where access to academic works is relatively expensive, are accused of pirating millions of scientific articles.