Elsevier Granted millions in damages from Sci-Hub by US Court

One of the world’s largest science publishers, Elsevier, won a default legal judgment 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 totaling $15 million. The Dutch publishing giant holds the copyrights for the largest share of the roughly 28 million papers downloaded from Sci-Hub over 6 months in 2016, followed by Springer Nature and Wiley-Blackwell. But observers in academic publishing who are following the case have questioned whether Elsevier will ever see any damages from Elbakyan, who lives 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. Academic institutions and libraries in several countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, and Taiwan are at loggerheads with Elsevier over affordable licensing agreements, he notes. In Finland, for example, several thousand scientists have signed a petition saying they will abstain from all editorial and reviewing requests from Elsevier journals until a “fair deal” is reached between the publisher and the Finnish library consortium over subscription costs and open access models.

To read more, click Court Decision on Sci-Hub.