I'll be interested to see how far this goes, and if any ISPs start blocking the site. With the whole Net Neutrality debate, I'm curious to see if the ISPs change their stance when they start getting ordered to block sites.
And it's kind of dumb, because they could just get a new domain name, like many of the other torrent sites do. It's effectively worthless.
I mean, I know blocking some content is the norm in many countries (lots of European countries do it for various purposes (nazi content, child porn, etc, that are almost unanimously considered 'bad')). Isn't this a drastic new step for the US? (again, I don't exactly keep up with this, but this seems new to me)
So I wouldn't trust the integrity of any system which we are being denied information about.
The problem is, that mostly the only ones impacted are the people who were committing copyright infringement and they are a very small minority of the total population, poorly funded, and not a viable voting bloc.
It is going to be a tough battle. However, we have alternative means to reach the site.
Elsevier had a 36% profit margin last year, which is a pretty clear signal that they don't face sincere costs or competition.
Researchers don't get paid by journals for their submissions. In fact, it's usually exactly the opposite: most of the big ones have submission fees.
This is why I don't really have any sympathy for the publishers affected by Sci-Hub, when at the same I strenuously oppose software/game piracy. I just don't see what service they provide: they don't pay the researchers, they don't pay the peer reviewers, and they don't validate the papers beyond basic copy-editing and typesetting. They're just useless middlemen who provide no utility. I'll be spitting on their grave when we finally get rid of them.
* by appearing in the US court defenders would put themselves into the court's jurisdiction. It is a virtual certainty that the defendants will lose.
* by not appearing in the US court the defendants would get a default judgement against them. A third party might claim that a court ordering ISP blocking becomes a kangaroo court, but that third party has no standing in the case and unless for some strange reason a judge decides to do more than just follow a default procedure whatever is asked in the lawsuit would be granted to the plaintiff.
Edit: In theory, a plaintiff can ask as a part of a relief to make a defendant walk around a block for three hours, making donkey noises and if a defendant does not show up it may very well end up being awarded as a part of a default judgement. By appearing, the defendant most likely can get this part of the remedy tossed but at the same time by appearing the defendant would place itself into court's jurisdiction.
So it is a no win case for a defendant.
I'm not a lawyer, but it appears that the lawsuit started off as ACS vs. John Does Sci-Hub/Alexandra Elbakyan, and ended as ACS vs. every ISP out there.
Just seems strange to file a verdict against ISPs, without providing them the chance of being a defendant, or at the very least part of the lawsuit. Not that most of them would care about blocking a website, but on principle it seems odd.
I agree that "trying to get injunctions against sites breaking US law" is mundane regardless of whether one agrees with the law, but that's not really my concern here. Generally pursuit of actors outside US jurisdiction is either abandoned or done in partnership with foreign governments (e.g. trade secrets theft). What's deeply alarming is the movement towards a UK-style system of ISP blocks against objectionable foreign content.
Presuming, of course, that the US has jurisdiction over the whole internet.
Student performance at that institution is so terrible that you either use pay-to-publish journals (can't call them predatory, if you publish there you are the customer, not the prey) or you use Elsevier's bottom-of-barrel publish-anything journals.
This is the game you have to play to keep the income going, and Elsevier enables it, now with the help of the State Department, on the backs of the taxpayer.