The Kazakh-Russian founder of Sci-Hub is obliged to pay $ 19.8 million and be subject to "Chinese" censorship.
A Virginia court ruled to prosecute Alexandra Elbakyan, the Kazakh-Russian administrator of Sci-Hub, the world's key pirate resource for scientific publications. In addition to the multimillion-dollar fine, which will still not work (Elbakyan is hiding in Russia), the court ruled that it gives the Western organizations “affected” by Elbakian's actions the right to subject her to harsh Chinese-style Internet censorship. Until now, in the US, such actions have been viewed as restrictions on freedom of speech. ArsTechnica writes about what is happening.
Alexandra Elbakyan is one of ten people last year according to the leading scientific journal Nature. At the same time, Western scientific publishers regard it as a key scientific pirate. Before the advent of her brainchild - the Sci-Hub site, anyone wishing to access scientific articles had to pay for an expensive electronic subscription. And even in this case, it was inconvenient to download articles from magazines, due to the clumsy interface inherent in most of them.
Elbakyan's website and she herself are very popular in the West in the scientific community. The same cannot be said about publishing houses. Earlier, the American court has already fined Alexandra $ 15 million. The punishment remained purely formal, due to the lack of information about the specific whereabouts of Elbakyan.
The new lawsuit was filed by the American Chemical Society, another organization that provides access to scientific journals for money. The amount of the fine was set at $ 4.8 million. The new court decision gives the American Chemical Society the right to require search engines like Google to remove Sci-Hub from the results. In addition, it allows you to require providers and domain name owners to block access to the site for both its owners and visitors.
Meanwhile, the United States, unlike the PRC and partly Russia, still did not know the systemic Internet censorship of such a level of rigidity. Usually, American human rights activists classify countries with such instruments of influence on public debate as dictatorships or authoritarian regimes. There was a serious debate about how such a serious violation of free speech is generally legal in America. The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which includes Amazon, Facebook, Google, Mozilla and Uber, note that this is generally contrary to American law.
It should be noted that earlier it was easier for publishers of scientific journals to deal with pirates who gave free access to scientific articles. Before Elbakyan, they lived exclusively in the United States, which allowed them to be judged freely. The largest such figure, American Aaron Schwartz, was driven to suicide during the preparation of one of such trials in 2013. However, since the epicenter of piracy activity has moved to Russia, there is simply nothing to put pressure on the “scientific” pirates: in our country, the processes of intellectual property rights are relatively successful. In addition, Elbakyan prudently does not say where in Russia (or Kazakhstan) he lives.
IVAN ORTEGA
Promotional video: