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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]."
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]."
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,
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.
.free the world's knowledge from these paywall-mongers for the betterment of personkind. How very dare she.
Requiem for the American Dream
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.
Real lawyers write in C++