American Chemical Society wins $4.8 million lawsuit against pirate site and may be able to stop internet search engines from featuring its stolen content
A US court has handed a $4.8 million (£3.7 million) legal victory to the American Chemical Society (ACS), ordering Sci-Hub, which provides illegal access to millions of scientific papers, to be shut down for copyright and trademark infringement. But this is unlikely to be the end of the story.
The court granted the ACS a permanent injunction against Sci-Hub and its affiliates, and gave the organisation the right to potentially demand that internet search engines stop delivering Sci-Hub content in their search results. Representatives of Sci-Hub, including founder Alexandra Elbakyan who operates the site out of Russia, did not attend the court proceedings.
The ACS filed its lawsuit in June, right after another US court had awarded publishing giant Elsevier $15 million in damages from Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis and similar sites.
The ACS called the latest development ‘a victory for copyright law and the entire publishing enterprise’. The organisation said it was clear from the outset that Sci-Hub has pirated copyrighted and trademarked content on a massive scale, and that the group’s decision to not attend the court proceedings indicates that its position was indefensible.
But it remains to be determined whether the court’s decision will have any real effect. ‘At this moment, nothing has changed – you can still go to the same website and use it to get scientific articles,’ explains Daniel Himmelstein, a data scientist and open science advocate who is a postdoc researcher at the University of Pennsylvania. However, Himmelstein suggests that the ACS probably won’t see the money it’s owed from Sci-Hub. He explains that Sci-Hub doesn’t keep monetary assets in the US or anywhere that the US banking system can reach. ‘Sci-Hub has some bank accounts in Russia, and also they use bitcoin […] which ensures that their assets are immune from government seizure,’ he tells Chemistry World. According to Himmelstein, Elsevier hasn’t collected the $15 million from its legal victory in June.
Peter Suber, who directs Harvard University’s scholarly communication office, says this latest legal defeat won’t make Sci-Hub disappear, but he warns that the court ruling is very broad and permits ACS to take steps that are ‘radical and harmful’, including potentially suppressing internet search engines. ‘The ACS now could use search engine censorship as a tool for enforcing copyrights,’ Suber states. ‘The organisation can use this judgement to try to close down internet service providers (ISPs) that are hosting Sci-Hub, but most of those are in other countries.’
Heather Joseph, the executive director of open access advocacy group the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, expresses similar concerns. ‘It is astonishing to see the overreach in lumping ISPs, search engines, web hosting sites and other service providers into the same category as Sci-Hub,’ she states. ‘These services have not infringed the ACS’s copyrights, and are not even named in the lawsuit – raising a hornets’ nest of concerns over their ability to continue to operate freely.’
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