First came the $15 million fine a New York federal judge imposed on Sci-Hub, a scientific research piracy site that has freed tens of thousands of research papers from behind paywalls. That was in June, and the site’s overseas operator, Alexandra Elbakyan, said she’d never pay plaintiff Elsevier or stop the infringing behavior.
Elbakyan
Now on Friday, a Virginia federal judge dinged the site for another $4.8 million for the same infringing behavior, this time from a lawsuit brought by the American Chemical Society.
The latest Friday order (PDF), like the previous order (PDF), demands that domain providers stop servicing Sci-Hub. The site has been playing a game of domain Whac-a-Mole for years in a bid to skirt US judicial orders.
Elbakyan, of Russia, did not participate in the legal proceedings.
That said, the latest order, unlike the first one, gives the American Chemical Society some serious legal ammunition. It grants the society the right to demand search engines like Google stop showing Sci-Hub in search results. And the order gives other legal fodder as well. It says that the Chemical Society may demand that “Internet search engines, Web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access” to Sci-Hub.
The order came three weeks after the tech sector, represented by the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), told the court that it would be illegal to issue this type of wide-ranging order that the American Chemical Society wanted. The association’s members range from Amazon, to Facebook, Google, Mozilla, and to Uber. The group said:
As further explained by CCIA, the proposed injunction would also circumvent the safe harbors of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which place clear limits on the scope of injunctive relief available against search engines and similar services. Finally, the proposed injunction is impermissibly overbroad and ambiguous, to the detriment of the due process rights of CCIA and its members, who have not been given the opportunity to appear in this matter.
The ruling comes as a California judge has blocked a ruling from the Canadian Supreme Court from going into effect in the US. The Canadian order would have ordered Google to de-index all pages belonging to a company called Datalink, which was allegedly selling products that violated the IP of Vancouver-based Equustek.
Meanwhile, in the Sci-Hub matter, Elbakyan did not immediately respond for comment.
In an Ars profile of the Sci-Hub dispute, we likened Elbakyan’s mission to liberate research to the ideals of Aaron Swartz, who believed that knowledge shouldn’t be behind paywalls. Elbakyan has liberated hundreds of thousands of academic papers that have been downloaded for free from the Sci-Hub site. Swartz was notoriously charged as a hacker for trying to free millions of articles from popular academic hub JSTOR. At age 26, he committed suicide just ahead of his federal trial in 2013.
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