US court allows blocking Sci-Hub

The Sci-Hub pirate research hub received another blow from the American judicial system. In May, Elsevier, one of the largest scientific publishers, imposed a fine of $ 15 million on a young neurobiologist and programmer activist, Alexandru Elbakian, and now the American Chemical Society (AXO) won a lawsuit of $ 4.6 million (the amount is calculated as the number of downloads of 32 scientific multiplied by the price of scientific journals in which they are published). Although the publisher is unlikely to receive money from Alexandra, the Federal District Court of the Eastern District of Virginia has provided other penalties.



Most importantly, the court agreed with the request of the AHO to impose an order on third parties. So, any search engines, hosters, providers, domain name registrars are required by AXO to block the Sci-Hub site. Hosters can not provide hosting Sci-Hub, search engines are forbidden to put links to Sci-Hub, and Internet providers are obliged to block access to the site, if the AXO requires this.



The relevant part of the judgment is cited in the screenshot.









It is possible that Internet service providers and other companies will try to challenge the court order if the AXO requires it to be implemented. Moreover, blocking access to a Sci-Hub mirror on the Onion network is virtually impossible.



Today, Sci-Hub is one of the most popular sites in the scientific community. Millions of visitors per month get access to original scientific publications - just enter the DOI-identifier. The base Sci-Hub more than 60 million scientific articles. For many scientists from countries where access to the scientific press is limited, this is the only opportunity to read authentic scientific articles. Other independent researchers are simply not rich enough - they can not lay out a few thousand dollars to read articles on their research topic.



According to statistics for the six months of 2015-2016, China (4.4 million), India (3.4 million), Iran (2.6 million), Russia and the United States were the leaders in the number of downloaded scientific articles.





The number of downloads of Sci-Hub documents from the United States for the 6 months of 2015-2016. On the 1st place is the city of Ashburn (96 857), where by coincidence the Wikimedia Foundation servers are located



The Sci-Hub website is now available at the following addresses:



https://sci-hub.cc/

http://sci-hub.bz/



Iranian counterpart:



https://freepaper.me/