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TorrentFreak reports that the academic publishing giant Elsevier has filed a complaint in a New York District Court to attempt to shut down the Library Genesis and SciHub.org search engines:
According to Elsevier the company is losing revenue because of these sites, so in order to stem the tide the publisher has filed a complaint [PDF] at a New York federal court hoping to shut them down.
"Defendants are reproducing and distributing unauthorized copies of Elsevier's copyrighted materials, unlawfully obtained from ScienceDirect, through Sci-Hub and through various websites affiliated with the Library Genesis Project," the complaint reads. "Specifically, Defendants utilize their websites located at sci-hub.org and at the Libgen Domains to operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database," it adds.
According to Elsevier, the websites access articles by using unlawfully obtained student or faculty access credentials. The articles are then added to the "pirate" library, backed up on their own servers.
Tom Allen, President of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), informs TF that websites such as Libgen pose a threat to the quality of scientific publications, as well as the public health. "Scholarly publishers work to ensure the accuracy of the scientific record by issuing corrections and revisions to research findings as needed; Libgen typically does not," Allen says. "As a result, its repository of illegally obtained content poses a threat to both quality journal publishing and to public health and safety."
The court has yet to decide whether the injunctions should be granted, but considering outcomes in recent piracy cases there's a good chance this will happen. For the time being, however, the Libgen and Sci-hub websites remain online.
Original Submission
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2015, @01:12AM
So while sharing public papers, articles and reports might be fine sharing complete books and comic-books probably isn't.
Maybe not "fine" according to the current legal system, but that isn't what truly matters.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 10 2015, @04:33AM
Seconded. Elsevier is one of the worst academic publishers. They're total parasites. They have some nerve to complain about violations of copyrights that they shouldn't own in the first place.
Academic publishers don't pay for research at all. They don't pay the researchers or the public one damned cent of any fees their paywalls happen to collect. They don't pay for peer review either. They ask researchers to donate time to organize other researchers to do reviews, also on donated time. Then they demand that researchers turn over all copyright to them, for the privilege of being published, and for their own convenience so they don't have to worry about any messy permission seeking should they wish to republish or do anything else with those works after the initial publication. They were never supposed to hold research hostage for ransom money, never supposed to tell researchers that they couldn't hand out copies of their *own* work to interested parties. That was the unwritten part of the understanding in asking that researchers freely hand over copyright, that publishers would not seek to abuse the too strong laws. Everyone knew that total transfer of all rights was asking too much, but could live with the situation and accept the deal to work around the bad, clumsy, and heavy legal requirements, as long as the publishers didn't break trust. To my knowledge, the IEEE has never dared tell published researchers that they couldn't post their own research on the web, if they wanted, despite IEEE owning all copyright.