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US Court Grants ISPs and Search Engine Blockade of Sci-Hub (torrentfreak.com)
Sci-Hub, a scientific research piracy site home to thousands of research papers, has suffered another blow in a U.S. federal court. According to TorrentFreak, "The American Chemical Society has won a default judgment of $4.8 million for alleged copyright infringement against the site. In addition, the publisher was granted an unprecedented injunction which requires search engines and ISPs to block the platform." This comes after a $15 million fine was imposed on Sci-Hub by a New York federal judge earlier this year. From the report: Just before the weekend, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema issued a final decision which is a clear win for ACS. The publisher was awarded the maximum statutory damages of $4.8 million for 32 infringing works, as well as a permanent injunction. The injunction is not limited to domain name registrars and hosting companies, but expands to search engines, ISPs and hosting companies too, who can be ordered to stop linking to or offering services to Sci-Hub. The injunction means that Internet providers, such as Comcast, can be requested to block users from accessing Sci-Hub. That's a big deal since pirate site blockades are not common in the United States. The same is true for search engine blocking of copyright-infringing sites.
"Ordered that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of ACS's trademarks or copyrighted works," the injunction reads.
"Ordered that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of ACS's trademarks or copyrighted works," the injunction reads.
Try the library
Have you ever actually done that?
As an academic researcher, no single library can afford even a quarter of the journals a researcher might need in their field.
Do you know what grad students do to get their degree? Cheat. They use abstracts and hope nobody notices or they go to places like above and get the information they need illegally.
The problem has only become worse as journals increase their rates, their number, and universities providing fewer subscriptions every year.
It's as if the only people that post on higher-education articles either have their hand in the pot or are uneducated themselves.
For all the reasons I explained in my post when the magistrate judge's decision came out, this order likely cannot apply to ISPs, search engines, etc., because they weren't involved in the lawsuit (i.e., didn't have their proverbial day in court), and aren't in "active concert or participation" with Sci-Hub.
Sure enough, the actual decision here says: "ORDERED that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including [basically every player involved in providing internet services], cease facilitating access...."
This is basically like saying "everyone to whom the injunction applies must obey it (if ACS can prove they knew about it)," which pretty much says nothing.
First, no individual ISP, search provider, DNS provider, etc. etc. is obligated to do anything until ACS provides them with legal notice of the injunction or otherwise proves they actually saw it (ACS can't just say "Your Honor, it's been all over the news -- they HAD to have heard about it").
Second, ACS would have to show that the party was not just agnostically providing access to / search results for / DNS records for / etc., Sci-Hub just like any other website, but that the party was actually colluding with Sci-Hub. ACS would be very unlikely to be able to do this in my view, and it would be expensive for them to try (some of the smaller players might just fold to avoid the bother, but the larger ones are unlikely to want to set a precedent of just rolling over and implying they're subject to a court order in a case to which they were not a party and had no opportunity to defend their interests).
In short, any blocking would be strictly voluntary, and I'd be fairly surprised if we see a whole lot of that.
Yet many of the same scientists and the same university libraries that decry the barriers to access of the pay-to-play journals still feed the monster. Yes, yes, "publish or parish", and the library "must" carry these subscriptions. Or something like that.
The key will be to establish "open source" peer-reviewed journals that are backed by the biggest names in science and the major universities. That at this point it hasn't happened makes me think that the biggest names in science and the major universities like the way things are now...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It's more than that. The judge's demand is worthless and is unlawful.
Honestly the judge should know better. He can write all he wants about "Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries" in his court order. But if they were not part of the suit, they cannot be part of the order.
Of course, the judge can bring them in as new named parties, but by doing so he'll have to face the lawyers from all those companies. His order will need to stand scrutiny and appeals from the legal teams of many of the biggest companies in the world.
That part of the order should just be ignored for now. It is illegal, and if the court attempts to enforce it, they can find themselves at the wrong end of a bar review for it.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
You go to a research computer, and access scientific journals online. A decent size library will have subscriptions.
And what they don't have, you can get through intra library loan.
Have you ever tried that one? When I was looking at getting some papers that way, I was told it'd be a 6 week wait (for electronic copies) if you're lucky and things go fast. You are are dependent on a library accepting your request, and overall the system seems to be designed with the assumption that nobody using it might actually have any need for any information in a timely manner. (The one time I did use it, it was for something I wanted to read for my own reasons, and I would not have been able to check its status--basically, the only thing I'd get is notice of when it came in. I don't even know if there is a fail state--or if my request would linger in the system until the heat death of the universe if nobody accepted it.)
ACS could do a lot by having access to the papers it owns be cheap or even free to members--and making sure students who could join are aware of this particular benefit.