[Infowarrior] - US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub

[Richard Forno]

US court grants Elsevier millions in damages from Sci-Hub

Some doubt that the publishing giant will see any money from the pirate site.

Quirin Schiermeier
22 June 2017

http://www.nature.com/news/us-court-grants-elsevier-millions-in-damages-from-sci-hub-1.22196

One of the world's largest science publishers, Elsevier, won a default legal judgement on 21 June against websites that provide illicit access to tens of millions of research papers and books. A New York district court awarded Elsevier US$15 million in damages for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub, the Library of Genesis (LibGen) project and related sites.

Judge Robert Sweet had ruled in October 2015 that the sites violate US copyright. The court issued a preliminary injunction against the sites' operators, who nevertheless continued to provide unauthorized free access to paywalled content. Alexandra Elbakyan, a former neuroscientist who started Sci-Hub in 2011, operates the site out of Russia, using varying domain names and IP addresses.

In May, Elsevier gave the court a list of 100 articles illicitly made available by Sci-Hub and LibGen, and asked for a permanent injunction and damages totalling $15 million. The Dutch publishing giant holds the copyrights for the largest share of the roughly 28 million papers downloaded from Sci-Hub in 2016, followed by Springer Nature and Wiley-Blackwell. (Nature is published by Springer Nature, and Nature’s news and comment team is editorially independent of the publisher.) According to a recent analysis, almost 50% of articles requested from Sci-Hub are published by these three companies.

The defendants' “unlawful activities have caused and will continue to cause irreparable injury to Elsevier, its customers and the public”, Elsevier’s New York-based attorneys, DeVore & DeMarco, told the court. Following the 21 June hearing, Judge Sweet of the US district court in southern New York ruled in favour of Elsevier, in the absence of Elbakyan or legal representatives of any of the defendants.

"The Court has not mistaken illegal activity for a public good,” said Maria A. Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers — a trade group that Elsevier belongs to — in a statement released on  22 June. “On the contrary, it has recognized the defendants’ operation for the flagrant and sweeping infringement that it really is and affirmed the critical role of copyright law in furthering scientific research and the public interest.”

But academic publishing observers following the case have questioned whether Elsevier will ever see any damages from Elbakyan, who resides outside the court's jurisdiction and has no assets in the United States. The ruling is also unlikely to prompt Sci-Hub or other pirate sites to close up shop.

Elbakyan could not be reached for comment.

“This ruling should stand as a warning to those who knowingly violate others' rights," says Matt McKay, a spokesperson for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) in Oxford, UK. "Sci-Hub does not add any value to the scholarly community. It neither fosters scientific advancement nor does it value researchers’ achievements. It is simply a place for someone to go to download stolen content and then leave."

Nature
doi:10.1038/nature.2017.22196