The American Chemical Society has requested a default judgment of $4.8 million and a broad injunction against pirate website Sci-Hub in an ongoing legal battle.

The ACS filed its lawsuit against Sci-Hub in June, accusing the website of stealing and illegally reproducing and distributing copyrighted material. On Sept. 1 ACS asked for a default judgment against Sci-Hub after it failed to respond to the lawsuit. This default judgment calls for a payment of $4.8 million and an injunction that would require search engines and internet service providers (ISPs) to block the site.

Website Torrent Freak, which has followed Sci-Hub’s legal battles closely, said the injunction request is unusual. “[The injunction] suggests that search engines may have to remove the site from their indexes while ISPs could be required to block their users’ access to the site as well, which goes quite far.” The Torrent Freak article added that while it is not uncommon for domain name registries to be ordered to suspend domains, search engine removals and ISP blocking are not common in the United States.

Stephen McLaughlin, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin School of Information who closely followed Elsevier’s lawsuit against Sci-Hub earlier this year (the pirate website was ordered to pay $15 million in damages), said that he felt the ACS injunction request is “unreasonably broad.”

“The very idea makes my head spin,” said McLaughlin. “ISP blocking happens in the U.K., Germany and several other Western countries, but the U.S. simply doesn’t do that, to my knowledge.”

Glenn S. Ruskin, director of external affairs and communications for ACS, said that he believed “rendering Sci-Hub inaccessible through U.S. internet providers” is “within the purview of the court to grant,” though he said he did not know “the technical aspects or difficulty in accomplishing this.”

“Sci-Hub is stealing ACS-copyrighted content and illegally reproducing and disseminating it on their website and via spoofed websites that mirror ACS’s own website,” said Ruskin.