American court order that included web-blocking comes into effect

The website that has often been dubbed the ‘Pirate Bay of science’ has seemingly lost three of its domains, presumably as a result of the recent legal action by the American Chemical Society, whose academic papers Sci-Hub had distributed without licence.

Although not a music case, the ACS v Sci-Hub legal battle in the US courts was of interest to the wider copyright industries, because – as well as awarding the plaintiff’s damages – the judgement in favour of ACS provided a pretty wide-ranging injunction ordering third party internet companies to stop facilitating access to the file-sharing site.

One reading of that injunction suggests that the ruling is, among other things, ordering internet service providers to instigate web-blocks to stop their users from accessing Sci-Hub. That is significant because to date web-blocking has not been available to copyright owners as an anti-piracy tactic in America, even though music and movie companies have secured web-blocks aplenty against piracy sites in an assortment of other countries, not least the UK.

However, after the ruling, legal reps for ACS said they felt the injunction wasn’t as ground-breaking as some were suggesting, adding that they only planned to use the court order to target companies and organisations that directly provide services to Sci-Hub, such as domain registries, server hosting companies and outfits like CloudFlare.

It is assumed that – as Sci-hub.io, sci-hub.cc and sci-hub.ac all went offline this week – that is a sign of ACS putting its court order into effect and demanding that registries that administrate web addresses used by Sci-Hub cancel those domains.

Though the person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, is playing down the significance of those domains going offline. According to Torrentfreak, she posted an update to social media offering alternative ways for people to access her site.

When copyright owners go after the domain names of piracy sites, said sites often subsequently register alternative domains in countries where American court orders have less sway. Plus there are other ways for people to access sites when domain names go down.

Of course, most anti-piracy tactics – beyond pressuring piracy platform operators to voluntarily shut down their sites under the threat of mega-damages or prison time – only work to an extent, in that web savvy file-sharers can usually find a way around any sanctions. And the same is true of web-blocks, where ISPs are told to block their customers from accessing copyright infringing websites.

However, once ACS has enforced its court order against amenable domain registries and server hosting companies – and assuming Sci-Hub continues to happily distribute its papers without licence – it will be interesting to see if the society then chooses to adopt a wider interpretation of its injunction in order to force more internet companies to help limit access to the piracy platform. Including possible web-blocks.

Not that any one of those tactics would be a panacea by any means, but some copyright owners take the view that the more hurdles you can put in the way as people try to access piracy websites the better.