Science Memes

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Elsevier (mander.xyz)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 months ago (5 children)

I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.

Honestly, even though as a consumer I don't like it, I don't mind it that much. Doesn't seem right to take the extreme position of "publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things". There needs to be a balance.

Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn't interact with anything and can't be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I object because my public funds were used to pay for most of these papers. Publishers shouldn’t behave as if they own it.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

That's true. I was actually thinking/talking about this practice in general, not specifically with regards to Elsevier.

I definitely agree that scientific journals as they are today are unacceptable.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”. There needs to be a balance.

Nah, fuck that; that's both the opposite of an extreme position and is exactly the one we should take!

Copyright itself is a privilege and only exists in the first place "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts." Any entity that doesn't respect that purpose doesn't deserve to benefit from it at all.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 months ago

You are arguing that Elsevier shouldn't exist at all, or needs to be forcibly changed into something more fair and more free. I 100% agree with this.

But my point was in general, not about Elsevier but about all digital publications of any kind. This includes indie publications and indie games. If an indie developer makes a game, and it gets bought maybe 20 copies but pirated thousands of times, do you still say "fuck that" to figuring out which "customer" shared the game?

I agree with "fuck that" to huge publishers, and by all means pirate all their shit, but smaller guys need some way to safeguard themselves, and there's no way to decide that small guys can use a certain tool and big guys cannot.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

Definitely better than some of the DRM-riddled proprietary eBook formats.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Plus, if you have two people with legit access, you can pretty easily figure out what's going on and defeat it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

It would be pretty trivial for a script to automatically detect and delete tags like this, I would think. Diff two versions of the file and swap all diff characters to any non-display character.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Enlightened centrist