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CloudFlare Can Be Ordered To Disclose Science Piracy Website Owner Details (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A New York judge has ruled that CDN provider Cloudflare can be compelled to disclose customer details for the domains libgen.io and bookfi.org, both of which are alleged to provide pirated access to scientific and technical papers, infringing the rights of controversial academic publisher Elsevier. Judge Robert Sweet ruled 'The evidence set forth...demonstrates that Elsevier (publisher who filed the lawsuit) is unable to identify the operators of libgen.org or bookfi.org, or the true location of the computer servers upon which those websites are hosted, absent the ability to take discovery from Cloudflare.' Sweet's ruling refers to 'absent identifying information' necessitating an injunction for Cloudflare to surrender details intended to begin an investigative financial trail to the domain registrants. This information could have been provided by British company TLD Registrar Solutions, who registered libgen.org in 2012 -- and hardly seems likely to retrench under pressure, given the oft-criticised transparency of legal process between the U.S. and the United Kingdom. ICANN and WHOIS also seem like obvious first points of enquiry (however ICANN's secession from control by the United States government at the end of September may have complicated using it as a legal resource), but apparently, neither can help.
You're missing the OP's point, which is that this is an example of the Streisand Effect. Many people may not be that actively interested in reading scientific papers, but then they read articles like this about Elsevier going after these "pirates", and look into the issue, decide that Elsevier's actions and monopolization of the industry are abhorrent, so they go to the pirate sites and start reading, then they tell their friends all about it, and it snowballs.
We've seen this over and over and over on the internet: when some powerful interest wants to shut something down they don't like, it just brings attention to it and makes it even more popular.