Elsevier Wants To Stop Indian Medics, Students And Academics Accessing Knowledge The Only Way Most Of Them Can Afford: Via Sci-Hub And Libgen

from the copyright-is-not-an-inevitable,-divine,-or-natural-right dept

Last month Techdirt wrote about some ridiculous scaremongering from Elsevier against Sci-Hub, which the publisher claimed was a "security risk". Sci-Hub, with its 85 million academic papers, is an example of what are sometimes termed "shadow libraries". For many people around the world, especially in developing countries, such shadow libraries are very often the only way medics, students and academics can access journals whose elevated Western-level subscription prices are simply unaffordable for them. That fact makes a new attack by Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen shadow library particularly troubling. The Indian title The Wire has the details:

the publishing giants are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen be completely blocked in India through a so-called dynamic injunction. The publishers claim that they own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published, and that Sci-Hub and Libgen are engaged in violating various exclusive rights conferred on them under copyright law by providing free access to their copyrighted contents.

Techdirt readers will note the outrageous claim there: that these publishers "own exclusive rights to the manuscripts they have published". That's only true in the sense that most publishers force academics to hand over the copyright as a condition of being published. The publishers don't pay for that copyright, and contribute almost nothing to the final published paper save a little editing and formatting: manuscript review is carried out for free by other academics. And yet the publishers are demanding that Sci-Hub and Libgen should be blocked in India on this basis. Moreover, they want a "dynamic injunction":

That is, once a defendant's website is categorised as a "rogue website", the plaintiff won't have to go back to the judges to have any new domains blocked for sharing the same materials, and can simply get the injunction order extended with a request to the court's deputy registrar.

The legal action by publishers against shadow libraries is part of a broader offensive around the world, but there's a reason why they may face extra challenges in India -- over and above the fact that Sci-Hub and Libgen contain huge quantities of material that can unambiguously be shared quite legally. As Techdirt reported back in 2013, a group of Western publishers sued Delhi University over photocopied versions of academic textbooks. For many students in India, this was the only way they could afford such educational materials. In 2016, the Indian court ruled that "copyright is not an inevitable, divine, or natural right", and that photocopying textbooks is fair use.

The parallels with the new suit against Sci-Hub and Libgen are clear. The latter are digital photocopy sites: they make available copies of educational material to students and researchers who could not otherwise afford access to this knowledge. The copies made by Sci-Hub and Libgen should be seen for what they are: fair use of material that was in any case largely created using public funds for the betterment of humanity, not to boost the bottom line of publishers with profit margins of 35-40%.

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Filed Under: academic publishing, academic research, access to knowledge, censorship, copyright, dynamic injunction, india, injunctions, publishers
Companies: american chemical society, elsevier, libgen, sci-hub, wiley

The More Copyright Holders Move Up The Stack, The More They Put Everyone At Risk

from the taking-down-security-certs-is-bad dept

A little over a year ago, Matt Holt, who created the Caddy Server that helps make it easier to protect websites with HTTPS encryption, posted a hypothetical blog post, from the year 2022, in which he worried that enterprising and persistent copyright lawyers would have continued moving up the stack with their DMCA notices, and started to use the process to get HTTPS security certificates removed.

A lawyer need only be successful in convincing one of those four “choke points” by threatening legal action in order to suffocate the site. (There are others, like ISPs, which operate more generally, and we skip them for brevity.) These entities totally control the site’s availability, which is one crucial dimension of secure systems. Here they are again:

• Site owner. He or she can voluntarily remove the site/content.
• Web host. They can destroy the site owner’s account or files.
• Domain registrar. They can cancel or transfer ownership of the domain name.
• DNS provider. They can make the site inaccessible via hostname.

Now that it’s 2022, a site needs HTTPS in order to be trusted by browsers. At very least, this means they show an indicator above the page. Maybe it even means the browser shows a warning before navigating to the site. Either way, HTTPS is critical to a site’s availability and integrity.

DMCA lawyers are clever, and they realize this emerging trend. They contact a site’s CA and demand the site be disconnected for violating the law (despite lack of a court case). The CA, operating without policy for such requests and afraid of legal ramifications, revokes the site’s certificate.

Within hours, browsers begin to refuse connecting to the site on port 443 and warning flags fly instead, scaring users away. Browsers don’t revert to port 80 anymore because HTTPS is expected and using HTTP is effectively a downgrade attack. Visitors aren’t sure what to do, and the site goes offline around the globe.

We've raised some questions in the past about this process of copyright holders moving up the stack -- and not just targeting the content hosts, but companies further upstream, including ad providers, domain registers and registrars, and the like. There are serious issues with each of these, but going after security certificates seems especially pernicious.

But Matt was a bit off in his predicted timing on this. After his article ran, we learned of at least a few examples of copyright holders going after security certificate providers. Take for example this copyright notice that was sent to Squarespace (the host), Tucows (the domain register), and Let's Encrypt (the security certificate provider).

And now TorrentFreak notes that Comodo has revoked Sci-Hub's HTTPS certificate.

“In response to a court order against Sci-Hub, Comodo CA has revoked four certificates for the site,” Jonathan Skinner, Director, Global Channel Programs at Comodo CA informed TorrentFreak.

“By policy Comodo CA obeys court orders and the law to the full extent of its ability.”

Comodo refused to confirm any additional details, including whether these revocations were anything to do with the current ACS injunction. However, Susan R. Morrissey, Director of Communications at ACS, told TorrentFreak that the revocations were indeed part of ACS’ legal action against Sci-Hub.

“[T]he action is related to our continuing efforts to protect ACS’ intellectual property,” Morrissey confirmed.

We've obviously covered a lot about the Sci-hub story over the years, and the weird quixotic focus by some to take down a site focused on (of all things) better sharing academic knowledge (especially to academics in the developing world). It's already sickening enough the level to which some copyright holders have gone to effectively shut down a library, but going after the security certificate is beyond the pale.

The DMCA allows for approaching a variety of different intermediaries, from network communications, to hosts, to caching, to "information location tools" (i.e. search engines), but I have a very difficult time seeing how any of that applies to security certificate providers (or, for that matter, to domain registers).

Even more bizarre is that going after the security certificate doesn't stop any actual infringement -- it just makes users a lot less safe. And yet, it's coming from the very same copyright holders who keep trying to tell people they shouldn't pirate content because it exposes them to malware and viruses and dangerous computers and the like. But removing security certificates would make that a much more serious problem. And yet, here we have a case where ACS went after a security certificate, a judge okayed it, and Comodo played along. That's dangerous for the way the internet works and is kept secure. If they want to go after the hosts, go after the hosts. Destroying the ability to protect users by encrypting the traffic is just evil.

Filed Under: choke points, copyright, dmca, https, security certificates, ssl
Companies: acs, american chemical society, comodo, sci-hub

Judge Ignores Congress, Pretends SOPA Exists, Orders Site Blocking Of Sci-Hub

from the how's-that-work-now? dept

Last month, we wrote about the strange and unfortunate decision by a magistrate judge in the copycat lawsuit by the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub, the "renegade" online repository of academic knowledge. As we've discussed for years, the copyright attacks on Sci-Hub are silly, given the entire stated purpose of copyright is supposed to be to increase "learning" (and there's rarely a monetary incentive to the scholars writing academic articles). Copyright in academic papers is silly for a whole host of reasons, and then using copyright law to take down what is effectively an incredibly useful library of academic knowledge seems to run entirely counter to the basis of copyright law.

And yet, things with Sci-Hub keep getting dumber. After it lost the lawsuit Elsevier filed against it, the American Chemical Society jumped in to file a copy cat lawsuit. The issue last month was our surprise that a magistrate judge recommended an injunction against third parties who were not parties to the lawsuit, demanding that they block all access to Sci-Hub. This could impact tons of ISPs, search engines, domain registrars and more. On Friday, amazingly, the Title III judge on the case, Judge Leonie Brinkema, more or less went with the magistrate's recommendations, with one slight change. You can see the order and injunction either at those links, or embedded below.

Because Sci-Hub -- run by a woman who doesn't live in the US -- chose to ignore the lawsuit, this is a default judgment, so the judge never got to hear anyone else's viewpoint, other than ACS. It's troubling that the judge -- just prior to issuing the injunction -- decided to reject an attempted amicus brief from CCIA, which sought to explain why site blocking is not allowed as a remedy. The judge did make one change, which at the very least improves the injunction slightly. The official injunction reads as follows:

ORDERED that any person or entity in active concert or participation with Defendant Sci-Hub and with notice of the injunction, including any Internet search engines, web hosting and Internet service providers, domain name registrars, and domain name registries, cease facilitating access to any or all domain names and websites through which Defendant Sci-Hub engages in unlawful access to, use, reproduction, and distribution of the ACS Marks or ACS's Copyrighted Works; and it is FURTHER

ORDERED that the domain name registries and/or registrars for Defendant Sci-Hub's domain names and websites, or their technical administrators, shall place the domain names on registryHold/serverHold or other status to render the names/sites non-resolving.

The original recommendation from the magistrate judge said that "any person or entity in privity with Sci-Hub" had to do those things. The difference being switching out "in active concert or participation" rather than "in privity." That's... slightly better, but it's unclear exactly what "in active concert or participation" really means.

ACS is now claiming that this won't apply to general search engines, but just to those working more closely with Sci-Hub:

“The court’s affirmative ruling does not apply to search engines writ large, but only to those entities who have been in active concert or participation with Sci-Hub, such as websites that host ACS content stolen by Sci-Hub. ACS will now look to identify said entities and seek enforcement accordingly.”

Steve McLaughlin, who has been following the case closely, expects that ACS is likely to target Cloudflare with this injunction -- and it will be worth seeing how Cloudflare responds.

Either way, setting aside the questions about why we're even arguing about a library of academic research that was not incentivized by copyright, it's still perplexing that a federal judge believes this is a justifiable remedy. Again, five years ago Congerss explored the idea of allowing site blocking as a remedy for copyright infringement and decided against it when it chose not to pass SOPA/PIPA (whose main purpose was to create a site blocking remedy). No matter what you think of Sci-Hub, it should worry people when judges can demand third parties censor and block sites, without any First Amendment analysis whatsoever.

Filed Under: academic research, copyright, site blocking, sopa
Companies: acs, american chemical society, cloudflare, sci-hub