Three major academic publishers sued Sci-Hub and Libgen for copyright infringement in the Delhi High Court on December 21. Both sites provide unauthorized downloads of academic works to students and researchers. The publishers – Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society – are asking the judge to require dynamic blocking of the websites.
A statement by the All India People’s Science Network noted that Indian scholars downloaded around 7 million papers in 2016, which would have cost up to $250 million – a cost that Indian scholars would not have been able to meet. AIPSN stated “it is not only a case of publishers’ vs SciHub/Libgen. Here there is a huge community of students, teachers, research scholars and scientists whose access to these journals and books would virtually end if the publishers get their prayer in court for dynamic blocking to these sites. There will be serious long term consequences to science and education in India.” An op-ed in The Wire by Arul George Scaria makes a similar point – “… a dynamic injunction against Sci-Hub and Libgen could result in long-term harm to science in India and distort the fine balance within the copyright system. A court of law in India shouldn’t allow itself to become a tool for perpetuating inequalities in access to scientific literature in the developing world.”
The Breakthrough Science Society has circulated a sign-on statement of support for the defendants, arguing that “International publishers like Elsevier have created a business model where they treat knowledge created by academic research funded by taxpayers’ money as their private property. Those who produce this knowledge — the authors and reviewers of research papers — are not paid and yet these publishers make windfall profit of billions of dollars by selling subscriptions to libraries worldwide at exorbitantly inflated rates which most institutional libraries in India, and even developed countries, cannot afford. Without a subscription, a researcher has to pay between $30 and $50 to download each paper, which most individual Indian researchers cannot afford. Instead of facilitating the flow of research information, these companies are throttling it… We strongly oppose any form of commoditization of research information that is a hindrance to the development of science and the humanities. In the interest of the advancement of knowledge, Sci-Hub and Libgen should be allowed to operate in India.”
Sci-Hub had been other collecting statements of support on Twitter, but Twitter suspended its account on January 8. Twitter’s notice to Sci-Hub said that takedown was due to “a violation of Twitter policies, in particular the Counterfeiting Policy” [translated from Russian]. But Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan believes the timing is too coincidental, and that the suspension was due to the statements of support against the lawsuit.
