Sci-Hub Faces $4.8 Million Piracy Damages and ISP Blocking (torrentfreak.com)

The American Chemical Society (ACS), a leading source of academic publications in the field of chemistry, accused Sci-Hub of mass copyright infringement and is demanding $4.8 million in piracy damages. "Sci-Hub was made aware of the legal proceedings but did not appear in court," reports Torrent Freak. "As a result, a default was entered against the site, and a few days ago ACS specified its demands, which include $4.8 million in piracy damages." The complaint comes soon after the pirate site was ordered to pay $15 million in piracy damages to academic publisher Elsevier. From the report: "Here, ACS seeks a judgment against Sci-Hub in the amount of $4,800,000 -- which is based on infringement of a representative sample of publications containing the ACS Copyrighted Works multiplied by the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each publication," they write. "Sci-Hub's unabashed flouting of U.S. Copyright laws merits a strong deterrent. This Court has awarded a copyright holder maximum statutory damages where the defendant's actions were "clearly willful' and maximum damages were necessary to 'deter similar actors in the future.'" The publisher notes that the maximum statutory damages are only requested for 32 of its 9,000 registered works. This still adds up to a significant sum of money, of course, but that is needed as a deterrent, ACS claims.

Although the deterrent effect may sound plausible in most cases, another $4.8 million in debt is unlikely to worry Sci-Hub's owner, as she can't pay it off anyway. However, there's also a broad injunction on the table that may be more of a concern. The requested injunction prohibits Sci-Hub's owner to continue her work on the site. In addition, it also bars a wide range of other service providers from assisting others to access it. Specifically, it restrains "any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, to cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to [ACS's works]."

Comments

Perhaps I'm just crazy...

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

But I am finding it hard to find a place in my heart to enable companies to "own" published scientific research. If you're a scientist and you publish your findings, it should be free. Period. That doesn't stop someone from commercializing the fruits of their research according to the opaque patent laws around the globe, but the actual scientific discovery ought to be public and free.

Best,

Re: Perhaps I'm just crazy...

[chipschap]

You may think Google is evil, Apple is evil, Oracle is evil, MS is evil ... take your pick.

But Elsevier ... they are truly evil.

US Court - Russian Site

[The Raven]

I'm sure that the court action in a US court will have a huge effect on that Russian site, hosted in Russia, made by a Russian woman.

Or, you know, not.

Sci-Hub will continue to not give a shit what the random whinging of profit mongering science leeches like Elsevier and ACS. The world will collectively ignore the judgement and continue on reaping the benefits of free and open access to scientific research. And search engines will roll their eyes at requests to delete their indexes; hell, the corporations can't even get Google to stop indexing game and media piracy... do you really think they'll be able to deter the far less morally dubious 'piracy' that Alexandra's Sci-Hub encourages?

Just one more news article to pile on to the entire Barbara Streisand effect pile, just to make sure nobody is unaware of this awesome site.

Fuck off.

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently discovered sci-hub. The shear amount of knowledge accessible through it is astounding. These are things I'd never have had access to before due to location and financial reasons (some websites won't let me buy their stuff from my country, and I don't really have that kind of money to be flinging around paying for random papers and what not).

If we actually cared about our species as a whole, this sort of information would be freely available to those that seek it. I hope sci-hub can ignore these silly demands and continue improving their website. Fuck the ACS. They don't even sound like they were significantly affected by it.

How very dare she...

[easyTree]

.free the world's knowledge from these paywall-mongers for the betterment of personkind. How very dare she.

We need to wind back the clock...

[Roger W Moore]

But I am finding it hard to find a place in my heart to enable companies to "own" published scientific research.

They do not - they own the copyright on a paper. There is absolutely nothing to stop the author writing another paper with the same information and making that freely available. Indeed most papers in my field are preceded by a preprint on arxiv which is completely free.

If you're a scientist and you publish your findings, it should be free.

Agreed. The problem is that the reason that all these academic publishers exist has almost entirely vanished but there is a huge inertia in the system to change because many people's academic performance is evaluated based on where and how often they publish.

Personally, I think we need to go back to what we had before publishers took over. The current system grew out of scientific societies which would publish a regular bulletin based on letters from members who wrote in about a discovery they had made. As science took off the societies grew and printing thinker bulletins, more frequently with a larger circulation became a huge, expensive and time-consuming job given old printing presses. So the job was spun off to publishers who were good at doing this and they made their money to support the work by charging a subscription.

Today the journals need to be returned to the scientific societies which started them. The cost of publishing is basically nothing if you do it on the web and we academics already provide all the reviewing and correction of the content. The publisher is just involved in formatting and typesetting which is less important and easier to do if you publish online vs. a printing press.

Re:We need to wind back the clock...

[gl4ss]

look, if you pay salaries and benefits you are in fact running a for-profit organization that has made it's job/profit center to publish that stuff.

since your and your underlings salaries can be just any sum you deem, it is quite useless to talk about any sum since you just deemed the cost of publishing to be any sum you want it to be, which is basically as much money as you can possibly get from everyone involved, which is then divvied up as salaries - so no matter how much you got sponsorship you would still need to ask more money.

so with that logic you could ask 10 dollars per article view or 10 000 dollars. it doesn't really matter - all of that money would still go into your organizations pockets as salaries.

publishing the stuff you want to publish is in fact very cheap. what you are arguing is that the process of deciding what to publish is not cheap, mainly because you need to oversee it and straight up pay money to people to review the papers, instead of finding people to review them for honor points or people who are already employed at universities just to review such stuff.

that you even mention hosting leads just to believe that you do that with someone who is also profiting from the affair, since the actual cost is tiny compared to even flight ticket for any attendee to the conference - and surely you have some sponsors or are asking attendees some money? note that cost of hosting goes up drastically if you need to pay some outsider to run a webshop to purchase your papers.

but here comes the real kicker, do you ask money from the people who want their papers published or from the people who want to read them? or both? I'm pretty sure that you should already know that the organization in spotlight of this article does both and the aim is to extract as much profit as possible, not to act on cost by any means.

you could do it cheaper of course, but that would mean someone losing their salary. maybe the janitor as the first one,

Elsevier is a huge profit center, don't kid yourself about it. it generates straight up profit and pays ridiculous salaries for jobs that could be done cheaper - and you, you're just working your way up to there.

the bigger problem in science community in general is that having it published in a "prestigious" journal is more important than what the paper itself has. literally 99.99% useless - even the published stuff. this is just result of the institutional fetish of publishing stuff even if you have in fact found or figured out nothing new and the result of the work would be much more useful to the world in general formatted differently as a post on blogspot, instead the 1 sentence of useful information is buried in 4 pages of paperspeak.

I mean, HYPERTEXT was arguably MADE for such texts and referenced information, to easily check out the referenced texts. so why is the scientific community still insisting that the system of publishing papers is good? because it provides the perfect circle jerk admittance?

Re:We need to wind back the clock...

[Roger W Moore]

If you are fair, then you are including the costs of the editors' time. I did in my analysis above.

If you included that then you are just being daft because you don't pay for it. Being an editor, reviewer or author is considered part of an academic's job. The current system relies on us to volunteer our time and so, when comparing alternatives against this system it is extremely fair to rely on the same free services that the current system enjoys.

Lots of Options

[SeattleLawGuy]

So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly? It is far from "basically nothing", especially in the aggregate. If you disagree, I challenge you to start and run your own high-quality publication for a decade in a financially responsible way. I have.

There are many options. It does have to get paid for, but copyright may not be the best way to do it--in fact, we know it isn't, because it restrict access to information that is literally there to advance human knowledge. Perhaps schools and individuals who wish to publish could subscribe to publishing cooperatives, for example.

In the alternative, scientific papers could more sensibly be treated like patents--a short period of monopoly, followed by public use.

The big problem is the politics of trying to get it done, not that there's any intrinsic preference for copyright-based pricing of access to scientific knowledge.

Re:Place blame where it belongs

[queazocotal]

Utter bullshit.
I am a patient, with a severe medical condition.
A moderate fraction of new papers on my disease are available openly.
Very much not all.
Plus, only looking at new papers doesn't help you at all to dig out if the rationale for work, which is based on earlier work is sane.

Not all work is funded through the NIH, and almost none is outside the USA.

Re:We need to wind back thSo, where shoue clock...

[Man On Pink Corner]

So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly?

Same place the funding for the original research itself came from? Add the "cost of publishing" to the grant proposal.

And if it's publicly-funded at taxpayer expense, don't even THINK about putting the result behind a goddamned paywall.