Court Order Forces UK ISP TalkTalk to Block Sci-Hub Website

[Chewy_fox]

Broadband ISP TalkTalk has this week updated their list of blocked websites (i.e. those where they’ve been ordered by the UK high court to do so) to include the controversial Sci-Hub, which describes itself as being “the first pirate website in the world to provide [free] mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers.”

At present ISPs can only be forced, via a court order, to block websites if they are found to heavily facilitate internet copyright infringement, which is supported via Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. Hundreds of piracy sites have been blocked as a result of this (including thousands of proxy sites and mirror domains for those), but most of those are focused on file sharing (P2P / Torrent), counterfeit goods or streaming.

By comparison Sci-Hub is a site that tends to divide opinion over the issue of access to knowledge. On the one hand the site enjoys support from those who believe that scientific research, which helps to further knowledge and education, should not be locked away behind paywalls (i.e. restricted access). But on the other hand, there are those who view Sci-Hub as little more than “cybercriminals” that cause “real harm to individual libraries” and universities (here).

Nevertheless, given the latest update to TalkTalk’s Block List, it appears as if two academic publishers – Elsevier and Springer Nature – have now succeeded in getting the High Court to extend their blocking injunctions to include Sci-Hub (credits to TorrentFreak for spotting). At the time of writing the website still appears to be accessible on other ISPs and it’s not mentioned on Virgin Media’s own block list, but this may well change.

Sadly, the details of this case have not yet been made public. Meanwhile network-level ISP blocking like this remains wafer thin because the site isn’t removed at its sources (beyond an ISPs reach), which means that anybody who actively goes looking for such content will easily be able to find a myriad of ways around such restrictions (e.g VPN, Proxy Servers etc.).

Edited May 22, 2021 by Chewy_fox

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