Downloading 2,578 documents in two days led to the closure of the IP of the University of Social Sciences. Is it reasonable?

In two days, the number of documents downloaded from the database was as high as 2578…

The “God” operation of a doctoral student in a Beijing university directly caused the school’s IP to be banned by the data provider.

And he himself was criticized by the school-wide bulletin for this.

At the same time, this matter quickly became a hot topic on Zhihu, Weibo and other platforms.

What exactly happened?

Students in school download documents abnormally, resulting in the school IP being banned

This happened at the University of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Not long ago, the school suddenly received a notification from a data provider, saying that “your school IP has been permanently banned”.

It turned out that someone downloaded the data provider’s documents abnormally on the campus network.

What kind of “abnormal” law?

According to the data provided by this data provider, someone spent 137 minutes downloading 842 articles on one day, and then spent the same time downloading 1,736 articles the next day.

That is, I downloaded nearly 2,600 articles in less than 5 hours .

After careful calculation, it is an average of nearly 10 downloads per minute, 1 in 6 seconds.

From the data provider’s point of view, this speed was obviously abnormal, and the school was immediately banned.

On the school’s side, after investigation by the school’s network center and library, it was indeed found that such a student did this: a doctoral student from the 2018 class of the Law School .

At the same time, the “Intellectual Property Rights and Use Management Rules for Electronic Resources” of the school library also stipulates:

Do not use software tools to download electronic resources in batches, or download electronic resources continuously, centrally, or in batches at an abnormal reading speed, or download electronic journals in their entirety.

The school believes that the student did violate the regulations, and the ban caused by this behavior also seriously affected the normal learning and scientific research order of the school’s teachers and students, and caused damage to the school’s reputation.

Therefore, the following two treatments were made to the student:

(1) Order the student to submit a written statement and review to the library to ensure that he will not commit the crime again;

(2) Criticism shall be communicated to the whole school.

It is reported that the data provider involved in this incident is the global legal database Westlaw Classic, which is a comprehensive legal, regulatory, news and company information platform developed in 1975 by the American West Publishing Company under the Thomson Reuters Legal and Regulatory Group.

Is Westlaw Classic really banning the school permanently?

Sources say the library is in ongoing communication with Westlaw Classic.

Is this reasonable?

After the incident came to light, it quickly caused a lot of discussion on the Internet.

First of all, although the school did not clearly explain how the student did it, netizens analyzed that this speed must be achieved with crawler tools.

Secondly, many people said that the student should indeed be punished.

As Zhihu answerer @cherish the moment said, there is no problem with normal downloads on normal channels, and more than 2,000 articles were downloaded in two days. This is an intentional behavior, and perhaps the purpose is not simple .

Furthermore, many schools have corresponding explicit regulations, but some students have not noticed or paid attention to them.

He said that people who download documents in places such as universities or public libraries still have to abide by relevant regulations to avoid malicious behavior.

However, some people have also raised questions about whether data providers are also responsible:

Since there is such a requirement, why not directly limit the number of downloads by a single person in a short period of time?

The implication is that why do you have to wait for the user to be banned directly?

At the same time, some people pointed the finger at the publishers behind, and found out the problem of academic publishers who have been criticized, and pointed out that although there is an agreement about the limitation of downloads, it is not reasonable in itself.

As Zhihu answerer @ Ermin said, students and scientific researchers should not have the right to dispose of their own papers as they are now. Data providers are now monopolizing themselves, and the state should break this monopoly.

Don’t make it into a situation where only data providers make money.

One More Thing

In fact, a similar thing happened at Peking University a few years ago.

At that time, the school was also warned by the Westlaw database provider, saying that an IP address of Peking University continuously downloaded 2,050 documents from the Westlaw database in a very short period of time, which constituted an excessive download.

It was verified that the behavior was a graduate student of the 2015 class of the School of Software and Microelectronics of Peking University.

In the end, the classmate deleted the over-downloaded literature and wrote a written apology letter.

The text and pictures in this article are from qubits

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This article is reprinted from https://www.techug.com/post/downloading-2578-documents-in-two-days-leads-to-the-closure-of-the-ip-address-of-the-unive653f22a39a4103c6cc0a/
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