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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

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> I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted

This is a violation of the takedown request, and can result in harsher penalties for the host. It's not a great example, but MegaUpload was faulted for doing just that: Removing the link between a url and the content that url pointed to. Granted they did deduplication so there could be other links from other urls pointed to the same "illegal" content, which is what the USA went after them for, but the fact remains that it's a pretty clear grey area whether or not the host can retain that data after someone claims rights to have it removed for their own future benefit.

Looking at the text of the law, it always uses "remove, or disable access to" or similar language: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

> presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.

Then what's the point? The whole point of Sci-hub is to distribute copyrighted papers, "archive" would be inaccessible until it is useless.

The point would be to keep an archive of scientific papers, but prevent access to them in case SciHub goes down.

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