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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]."
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.
As part of a scientific conference I run, I act as a publisher for the proceedings. I can assure you that the cost of publishing is absolutely NOT "basically nothing". If you were to properly account for all of our costs, it would run about $2000 per article. That includes things like salaries for editors and support staff, honoraria for reviewers (yes, we pay them), typesetting, office rent, electricity, web hosting, etc. For us, it does NOT include profit, as we exist as, essentially, an unofficial society.
Now, you can make the argument that the scientists are doing all of the work in generating the content. Yes, I agree. But the value that a publisher brings to bear is (a) mangement of the peer-review process, (b) a proper typesetting and consistent format --- and believe me, even if you provide incredibly rigid and explicit instructions, people figure out how to screw it up a dozen ways from Sunday, (c) a reputation for publishing only high-quality work, (d) recognition within the field that if someone associates themselves with our event, our reputation rubs off a little on them (and, yes, it's a two-way street: by selecting only high-quality work, we get a good reputation and vice-versa), and (e) indexing of your article.
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.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
They should have asked for the full $1,350,000,000 that the law allows. That would demonstrate how ridiculous it is to hold scientific knowledge hostage for payments to a publisher.
Many of the things you're talking about doing as an editor are not... valuable. The idea that there is value in prestige for publishing has been a disaster for science. This is a concept that is only about 40 years old, it is not some great tradition of science. Prestige publishing is immensely useful to professors and publishers, but not anyone else. We are at a historic low point for production of science that is useful or interesting to the general public when looking at per scientist or per dollar spent. We are epically failing to identify, execute, and communicate important research. In short, scientists and publishers do not know what "high quality" means anymore! Our current definition is incorrect!
Typesetting, formatting, web-hosting, indexing... if the authors and funders of the paper are not willing to do these things well, the work is not worth publishing. Think about what it means for the people funding research to abandon responsibility for it to someone else. I keep either open license or white paper manuscript versions of as many of my papers as I can on my website - that website also has significant SEO and search indexing work put into it. I do that because my funders insist on it, because they believe in the value of the work. It is truly eye-opening when your funder actually values your work. NSF, DOE, DoD, and NIH all manage or fund repositories of all of the reports produced by their grants going back decades (most not available online because of lobbying by publishers). Sci-Hub has a limited lifetime until these various agencies finish their transition to publicly available hosting of all of their funded results.
So what are you providing, really? Prestige publishing is a marketing tool for your journal, not a value for science. Hosting and formatting is something that should be done by any competent scientific funder. It should worry all of us that it is necessary for you to do this. That leaves us with peer review and editing.
These are valuable additions to a paper, but these functions can also be accomplished differently. The most traditional approach for review, the face-to-face meeting with experts, is why you have the conference in the first place. People are paying you to take part in that process! Either the conference is not functioning as a place to seriously discuss research (maybe save those honoraria for good session moderators), or peer review of the conference papers is simply a hoop-jumping exercise.
because their jobs depend on having publications in high impact journals. basically, the tax payer pays them to make acs and elselvier a shit ton of money. Its also technically illegal aiui, because us government funded work (with the exception of patents) is supposed to be public domain.