Over the years we have seen several piracy type websites jump from domain name to domain name. The Pirate Bay famously lost their .se domain and moved on to several like .la,.mn,.gd,.am and .vg. All of which have been since shut down.
Ars Technica published an article about Alexandra Elbakyan, a 27-year-old bioengineer turned Web programmer from Kazakhstan who is living in Russia. Elbakyan is being sued by one of the world’s leading academic publishers, Elsevier.
Elbakyan named her website Sci-Hub and started out on .org and had to move to a .io after the .org got shut down. She registered the .io with a Chinese registrar and they have now shut down the .io. The site has moved to the likes of .bz and .cc.
The article explains why Elsevier took action against Sci-Hub.
From the article:
Elsevier’s Science Direct catalog is behind a paywall at many universities. The publisher isn’t happy about the Sci-Hub site and its domain hopping, calling it “an international network of piracy (PDF) and copyright infringement by circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database. Defendants’ piracy is supported by the persistent intrusion and unauthorized access to the computer networks of Elsevier and its institutional subscribers….”
The comment section is pretty active and many wonder if there was public funding included should the papers be free. One commenter pointed out, “And while almost every academic receives public funding, one way or another, that doesn’t change the fact that their research has a copyright, and the journal generally won’t accept an article for publication without copyright assignment.”
Read the full article and conversation on ArsTechnica.com
