WIKIMEDIA, JRAMANANUpdate (October 16): Last Thursday (October 12), the Computer and Communications Industry Association, which represents major technology companies including Amazon, Google, and Facebook, filed a brief opposing the American Chemical Society’s request to have Internet service providers and search engines block access to Sci-Hub. The next hearing will take place this Friday (October 20) at a district court in Virginia.

This June, the American Chemical Society (ACS) brought a case against Sci-Hub, a pirate site providing access to scientific articles, for copyright and trademark infringement. Last Thursday (September 28), following a hearing at a court in Virginia, Magistrate Judge John Anderson filed a report that recommended ruling in favor of ACS on all counts.

ACS had filed a default judgment request against Sci-Hub in September, asking the court to order the site to cease illegal distribution of its materials and pay $4.8 million in damages. In addition, the society requested that Internet service providers (ISPs), search engines, and domain name registries stop facilitating access to the website.

If [the judge] does order US ISPs to block Sci-Hub, it would be a serious policy change in the United States.—Steve McLaughlin,

University of Texas at Austin

Anderson agreed that Sci-Hub was guilty of copyright and trademark infringement and recommended that ACS be granted all of its requests. Judge Leonie Brinkema, of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, will be making the final decision for this case.

Court-ordered suspensions of domain names have happened in the U.S. previously. For example, the publishing giant Elsevier was able to shut down sci-hub.org while pursuing its case against the site. Blocking access to sites by making search engines or ISPs censor them, however, is not common practice.

“Right now in the U.S., Internet service providers do not have to block sites—there are no known instances that I know of this happening in the U.S.,” says Daniel Himmelstein, a biodata scientist and postdoc at the University of Pennsylvania. “What the proposal is saying is that Internet service providers in the U.S. have the responsibly to check whether users are navigating to one of these forbidden domain names, and if so, to block it.”

Elsevier had also initially asked for a court to order ISP blocking in its case against Sci-Hub, which commenced in 2015. This request was withdrawn, however, after two technology industry groups, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and the Internet Commerce Coalition, filed a brief to the court opposing those measures. With the ACS case, no such lobbying has yet occurred.

“If [the judge] does order US ISPs to block Sci-Hub, it would be a serious policy change in the United States,” says Steve McLaughlin, an information studies doctoral student at the University of Texas at Austin. “The real risk of this is that it could open a Pandora’s box of other sites being blocked.”

But even if Judge Brinkema does order ISPs to stop facilitating access to the site, “there’s no way that the court could fully remove access to Sci-Hub,” Himmelstein says. This is because Sci-Hub also has a Tor address, which is located on the dark web, a part of the Internet that is hidden from standard search engines and where users can maintain anonymity. In addition, those outside the U.S. would be able to continue accessing the site from regular web browsers.

“The American Chemical Society is pleased with the recent report filed by the Magistrate Judge,” Glenn Ruskin, the director of ACS external affairs and communications, writes in an email to The Scientist. “The Society is now awaiting a final judgment in the case.”

Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub’s founder, has previously told The Scientist the site plans to ignore the lawsuit.