from Hacker News

Sci-Hub has been blocked in India

by the-mitr on 8/28/25, 4:47 AM with 149 comments

  • by sieve on 8/28/25, 6:16 AM

    I don't know why they decided to pause uploads. Relying on Indian courts for sensible and timely judgments will only lead to grief. They do not respect precedence and judgements often depend on the judge and the people involved rather than the facts of the case.

    What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...

  • by megaloblasto on 8/28/25, 12:10 PM

    I have to read a lot of papers for work. Sometimes 2 or 3 a day. Often when I find one I'm interested in, they want $60 to read the one paper. If I have to read one paper a day, that's about $20,000 a year just to stay up to date with the science.

    That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.

  • by willgax on 8/28/25, 6:11 AM

    An individual scientist/researcher (most of them) is in pursuit of truth. Nothing matters, and nothing should matter other than that. For future discoveries, we should make knowledge as accessible as possible. But when an organization forms, it competes for power and superiority. This results in discriminatory actions that cause the overall regression of collective innovation. It is sad to see this happen.

  • by nesk_ on 8/28/25, 6:07 AM

    What a shameful government!

    clicks the link

    blocked

    Oh right, France government is shameful too.

  • by diggan on 8/28/25, 6:27 AM

    Ironically, hosted on a page that me in "modern" Spain cannot read as Sci-Hub been blocked here with a lot of ISPs for a long time :)

  • by faangguyindia on 8/28/25, 5:46 AM

    Knowledge should not be restricted in anyway, we should have direct access to these and also LLMs as well.

    Currently, many LLM services only provide stuff from the study abstract.

  • by jacquesm on 8/28/25, 6:39 AM

    India has nothing to gain and everything to lose with this block.

  • by thisisit on 8/28/25, 12:29 PM

    > However, the New Delhi court was never able to make a decision on the matter. The hearings about Sci-Hub were re-scheduled again and again over the course of months and years

    Unfortunately this is a common tactic - get a ruling which favors you and then file for delays citing sometimes ridiculous excuse. There is no concept of "justice delayed is justice denied" - lot of cases stay in limbo.

    >I'm aware that although the interim order to block the websites was passed, the case itself is not settled. There are currently intervenors in the case, that you can join.

    The tactic will remain the same. Keep the case in limbo.

    That said, people have the jugaad-mindset so, you can bet if this goes through people will find ways to circumvent at massive scale.

  • by dartharva on 8/28/25, 11:38 AM

    Indian here, living in Mumbai, can still access sci-hub (.se and all other mirrors). My local broadband provider has not been implementing any of the government bans on websites that other "mainstream" telecom providers are. Yay for small businesses!

  • by tim333 on 8/28/25, 6:22 AM

    It's also 'blocked' in the UK, to the extent that I had one more click, on the vpn button, to read the article. (Veepn free browser extension seems to work well - I've used that for a year or two).

  • by wtmt on 8/28/25, 11:56 AM

    > Why would a justice in India serve the interests of a few rich foreign companies, while ignoring the needs of Indian students and researchers?

    Because they’re used to serving the interests of large companies (domestic and international) as well as bowing to any executive comments or opinions. Indian judges rule first with their own opinions and moral views, then maybe look at the law, and then maybe consider the constitution (in that order).

    As the article notes, people will just use a VPN or Tor to access the sites. The courts in India do not understand technology (like in many other countries). They just acquiesce to the demands from large companies.

    With the indirect pressure through US tariffs, I wouldn’t rule out the executive finding ways to not annoy the US even more through some means.

    I have a longstanding pet peeve with it (the judiciary): the entire validity and legality of the Aadhaar biometric identity program has been in limbo, pending hearing by a constitutional bench (the conclusion of “Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank”). This bench hasn’t been constituted for several years. Chief Justice after Chief Justice in the Supreme Court has ignored it and let the executive bulldoze everyone to submit, get this “voluntary” (that’s the official definition) number and link it in more and more databases.

    Long story short, depending on the Indian judiciary for justice on large enough matters that affect the entire country and its future is futile. If it’s a simpler matter affecting one or two companies or a political party, the justice will be swift.

  • by the-mitr on 8/28/25, 7:11 AM

    It is rather unfortunate, sometime back even internet archive had been blocked (it was unblocked after sometime). Going forward researchers should take a firm stance that all research will be published as open access (not the gold one). That is the only long term solution.

    That being said Govt. of India did an en mass subscription for many journals for most research institutes, under the One Nation One Subscription scheme

    https://onos.gov.in/

  • by stonecharioteer on 8/28/25, 8:22 AM

    Piracy is not a problem India needs to deal with, we have bigger fish to fry. Accessible knowledge is absolutely necessary here, with even the educated masses now believing in complete hokum.

    I hope this gets overturned, but then again, if you're using the internet without a privacy-first VPN like mullvad, GG.

  • by 2Gkashmiri on 8/28/25, 7:50 AM

    been following the case since day 1. Its sad that the order does not talk about any of the points raised by scihub. This appears to me a one-sided order where the judge (we do not have jury concept in india) might have been a case of "we are copyright holders, our rights trump everything" when the case is for public good and fair use.

    Fair use was not explained and the plaintiffs took an argument that since alexandria is not an indian citizen or not in india, she does not fear indian laws and that somehow might have tipped the scales.

    I am sure this would be appealed and i would like to join in, i already tried to contact people few years ago but life got in the way.

    btw, i am a licensed indian lawyer

  • by Aachen on 8/28/25, 10:17 AM

    Should this sort of submission be using an .onion link, considering how many readers it is blocked for? Assuming (& iirc) sci-hub has an official one

  • by elashri on 8/28/25, 7:22 AM

    This is also a reminder that any serious science funding policy changes would address the elephant in the room. Science publication industry employ lobbies of course but the fact still that the requirements of hiring committees and funding decisions on publications in prestigious journals is the reason for this problem.

    And requiring open access publication is not the solution. The journals demands couple of thousands at least in fees if you opt on this option which is a waste of money that could be spent better.

    The scientific publications industry profit margin is the highest in the world. Higher even than the High tech companies for a reason [1].

    [1] https://theconversation.com/academic-publishing-is-a-multibi...

  • by torh on 8/28/25, 5:50 AM

    This site is blocked at my workplace as well. A message from FortiGate says: "Category: Illegal or Unethical"

  • by hnhg on 8/28/25, 6:25 AM

    Seems like India is shooting itself in the foot by making it more difficult to access knowledge for the benefit of overseas publishers. Countries that don't do this will be at an advantage.

  • by dartharva on 8/28/25, 11:41 AM

    Important to note that India has single-payer subscription for most academic journals, which is freely accessible to students in public colleges throughout the country.

  • by boramalper on 8/28/25, 8:04 AM

    For those who didn’t read the full article, because people often don’t, here is the actual / other major reason why Sci-Hub stopped:

    > Why Sci-Hub stopped

    > The court order was not the main reason Sci-Hub stopped releasing new papers: by 2022 most university libraries implemented two-factor authentication, and as a result, Sci-Hub could not automatically login to libraries using student / researcher username and password to download new papers. Those paywall-circumvention methods that worked well in 2011-2015 became useless in 2022.

  • by pmdr on 8/28/25, 7:28 AM

    But has sci-hub really been working as of late? Last time I checked I couldn't find anything.

  • by michaelhoney on 8/28/25, 11:39 PM

    Why would you make life harder for your own citizens by doing this?

  • by throwaway48476 on 8/28/25, 1:15 PM

    The unseen tragedy of science paywalls is the research tools that haven't been written. The metaphorical wheel is constantly being reinvented by the general public because there is no tool that has access to all journals for doing fuzzy text search.

  • by DataDaemon on 8/28/25, 6:22 AM

    What's wrong with you India?