A New York District Court has granted Elsevier's request for a preliminary injunction against several sites that host academic publications without permission. As a result the site's operators are now ordered to quit offering access to infringing content, while the associated registries must suspend their domain names.

With a net income of more than $1 billion Elsevier is one of the largest academic publishers in the world.

Through its ScienceDirect portal the company offers access to millions of scientific articles spread out over 2,200 journals, most of which are behind a paywall.

Websites such as Sci-Hub and The Library Genesis Project, or Libgen for short, have systematically breached this barrier by hosting pirated copies of scientific publications as well as mainstream books.

Earlier this year one of the largest publishers went into action to stop this threat. Elsevier filed a complaint at a New York District Court, accusing the sites’ operators of systematic copyright infringement.

The publisher requested damages and asked for a preliminary injunction to prevent the sites from distributing their articles while the case is ongoing.

Late last week District Court Judge Robert Sweet approved the request (pdf), ordering the operators of Sci-Hub.org, Bookfi.org, Elibgen.org and several sister sites to cease their activities.

In addition, the responsible domain name registries are ordered to suspend the associated domain names until further notice.

Previously the Public Interest Registry (.ORG) refused to do so when Elsevier put in a request, noting that it would require a valid court order to suspend a domain name.

According to the order Elsevier showed that it’s likely to succeed based on its copyright infringement claims. In addition, there’s enough evidence to suggest that the defendants violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

“The balance of hardships clearly tips in favor of the Plaintiffs. Elsevier has shown that it is likely to succeed on the merits, and that it continues to suffer irreparable harm due to the Defendants’ making its copyrighted material available for free,” Judge Sweet writes.

The site’s operators have few grounds on which to fight the injunction, as they don’t have the right to distribute most of the articles in the first place.

“The Defendants cannot be legally harmed by the fact that they cannot continue to steal the Plaintiff’s content, even if they tried to do so for public-spirited reasons,” the order reads.

Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of Sci-Hub, is the only person who responded to Elsevier’s complaint. In a letter she sent to the court before the injunction hearing, she argued that the publisher is exploiting researchers and blocking access to knowledge.

Judge Sweet agrees that there is a public interest to safeguard broad access to scientific research. However, simply putting all research online without permission is not the answer.

“Elbakyan’s solution to the problems she identifies, simply making copyrighted content available for free via a foreign website, disserves the public interest,” Judge Sweet writes.

The Judge notes that under current law researchers and the public are allowed to publicly share “ideas and insights” from the articles without restrictions. People can also freely use the copyrighted articles for research or educational purposes under the fair use doctrine.

“Under this doctrine, Elsevier’s articles themselves may be taken and used, but only for legitimate purposes, and not for wholesale infringement,” the order reads.

At the time of writing several of the websites, including Sci-hub.org and Bookfi.org, are still online. It is expected that they will be suspended by the registry in a matter of days.

Time will tell whether the site operators will also stop offering copyrighted articles, or if they will simply move to a new domain name and continue business as usual.