After Being Sued To Block Sci-Hub; Swedish ISP Blocks Court's And Elsevier's Website In Protest

from the but-is-that-a-good-thing dept

Late last week, Torrentfreak had a fascinating story about Bahnhof's response to a court case demanding it block the site Sci-Hub due to demands from Elsevier that Sci-Hub was inducing infringement of academic papers. We've written in the past about Sci-Hub. Rather than an evil piracy site as Elsevier likes to imply, it is a very clever system to allow academics to share and access other academic works. Of course, Elsevier prefers to lock up academic research that it did not pay for, which is a travesty. And it has gone after Sci-Hub in multiple jurisdictions, and is constantly playing a form of Whac-a-Mole as Sci-Hub keeps on moving around (not to mention each attempt at taking it down only seems to add to Sci-Hub's popularity). In this case, Elsevier sought a blocking order in Sweden. The Swedish ISP, Bahnhof, which has spent years pushing back against copyright maximalist extremism, but without much luck.

In giving in to the block demand, however, Bahnhof went a step further. It also put up a "block" for any subscriber visiting Elsevier's sites or the court's sites:

These are not full "blocks" per se. After reading Bahnhof's protest message, you can then apparently click through to the original site.

I posted this on Twitter on Friday and it got a huge response, with many people cheering it on. I think many of them had an initial gut reaction that this was a clever (and somewhat amusing) way to protest what many people feel is an unjust blocking order by turning the tables on those who requested and approved the blocking order. Indeed, that was my instinctual reaction as well. But, I don't think we should be that celebratory about this.

For one thing, this is exactly the kind of thing that many of us warn about concerning a lack of net neutrality laws. In this case, many people support this because they all agree that Elsevier is being ridiculous and censorial here. But... it's not hard to imagine a different situation. How would people feel if an ISP were, say, putting up a similar block page for anyone trying to visit a union webpage of striking telco workers? Because that happened once in Canada. Then... it feels a bit more like a giant company using its market position to silence critics in its workforce. We shouldn't change our views on what is and what is not okay for an ISP to do based solely on whether or not we like who is put out by the decision.

Sweden doesn't currently have net neutrality rules as far as I can tell, though ironically it appears that Bahnhof sells a pro-net neutrality hoodie. But blocking sites -- even to make a good point in the ridiculousness of the site blocking order -- still goes against net neutrality and raises serious questions about whether anyone should want an ISP inspecting the sites that we go to and interjecting its own man in the middle attack to make a political message.

Suddenly... it doesn't look quite as clever in that light. I understand the value of protesting an unjust court ruling, and this certainly feels like just desserts for Elsevier and the court, but we should always see it as problematic when an ISP is getting between us and the sites we want to visit, even if it's for a good cause.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: copyright, net neutrality, protest, site blocking, sweden

Companies: bahnhof, elsevier, sci-hub