'Pirate' sites Sci-Hub and LibGen have been ordered to pay millions of dollars in damages to Elsevier, one of the largest academic publishers. A New York District Court granted Elsevier's request for a default judgment of $15 million in damages. Sci-Hub's founder says that she can't pay the damages even if she wanted to, and for now, the "Pirate Bay for science" isn't going anywhere.

Two years ago, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against Sci-Hub and several related “pirate” sites.

It accused the websites of making academic papers widely available to the public, without permission.

While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier’s legal team, who obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall.

The injunction ordered Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. However, this didn’t happen.

Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit achieved the opposite. Sci-Hub grew bigger and bigger up to a point where its users were downloading hundreds of thousands of papers per day.

Although Elbakyan sent a letter to the court earlier, she opted not engage in the US lawsuit any further. The same is true for her fellow defendants, associated with Libgen. As a result, Elsevier asked the court for a default judgment and a permanent injunction which were issued this week.

Following a hearing on Wednesday, the Court awarded Elsevier $15,000,000 in damages, the maximum statutory amount for the 100 copyrighted works that were listed in the complaint. In addition, the injunction, through which Sci-Hub and LibGen lost several domain names, was made permanent.

Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan says that even if she wanted to pay the millions of dollars in revenue, she doesn’t have the money to do so.

“The money project received and spent in about six years of its operation do not add up to 15 million,” Elbakyan tells torrentFreak.

“More interesting, Elsevier says: the Sci-Hub activity ’causes irreparable injury to Elsevier, its customers and the public’ and US court agreed. That feels like a perfect crime. If you want to cause an irreparable injury to American public, what do you have to do? Now we know the answer: establish a website where they can read research articles for free,” she adds.

Previously, Elbakyan already confirmed to us that, lawsuit or not, the site is not going anywhere.

“The Sci-Hub will continue as usual. In case of problems with the domain names, users can rely on TOR scihub22266oqcxt.onion,” Elbakyan added.

Sci-Hub is regularly referred to as the “Pirate Bay for science,” and based on the site’s resilience and its response to legal threats, it can certainly live up to this claim.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is happy with the outcome of the case.

“As the final judgment shows, the Court has not mistaken illegal activity for a public good,” AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante says.

“On the contrary, it has recognized the defendants’ operation for the flagrant and sweeping infringement that it really is and affirmed the critical role of copyright law in furthering scientific research and the public interest.”

Matt McKay, a spokesperson for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) in Oxford went even further, telling Nature that the site doesn’t offer any value to the scientific comunity.

“Sci-Hub does not add any value to the scholarly community. It neither fosters scientific advancement nor does it value researchers’ achievements. It is simply a place for someone to go to download stolen content and then leave.”

Hundreds of thousands of academics, who regularly use the site to download papers, might contest this though.

With no real prospect of recouping the damages and an ever-resilient Elbakyan, Elsevier’s legal battle could just be a win on paper. Sci-Hub and Libgen are not going anywhere, it seems, and the lawsuit has made them more popular than ever before.