3 Count: Science Fact, Single Feature

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1: Elsevier Complaint Shuts Down Sci-Hub Domain Name

First off today, Ernesto at Torrentfreak writes that scientific publisher Elsevier has secure the shut down of another domain for the controversial Sci-Hub site, however, the site remains active on several backup domains.

Sci-Hub is a site that offers free downloads of scientific papers and research articles, many of which are available only behind paywalls or in paid journals. Though Sci-Hub claims that it is supporting open scientific innovation, Elsevier and other publishers view it as a pirate site and Elsevier went to court and won an injunction against them.

But while the injunction has failed to actually stop the site, Elsevier has used the injunction to get several of the domains Sci-Hub is using revoked, first with the .org domain and now with the .io domain. However, the site has backup domains and continues to operate though bookmarks and inbound links will again need to be updated.

2: Porn Studio Alleges Ontario Man, Website Pirating Videos

Next up today, Terry Davidson at The Toronto Sun reports that porn company AMA Multimedia LLC has filed a lawsuit against Windsor resident David Koonar, the owner of the site Porn.com, alleging copyright infringement of over 100 videos.

According to the lawsuit, Porn.com takes videos from other sites and uploads them directly to theirs, where they charge membership fees for others to view. AMA claims that Porn.com obtained the videos by scraping videos from two others sites that also hosted illegal copies of AMA’s work.

Porn.com has filed with the U.S. Copyright Office to receive safe harbor protection underneath the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But AMA claims that the scraping and republishing is coming from Porn.com’s staff, meaning they no longer qualify for such protection. They claim to have evidence of this including the lack of uploader information and, in some cases, upload timestamps that predate the creation of the video. The lawsuit was filed in Arizona despite Koonar living in Canada.

3: Moneyweb Loses Plagiarism Case Against Media24

Finally today, BusinessDay Live reports that, in South Africa, the financial news website Moneyweb has suffered a defeat in their lawsuit against Media24 and their financial news site Fin24.

The lawsuit, which was filed in September 2013, alleged that Fin24 took content from Moneyweb and simply rewrote and republished it on their site. The lawsuit focused on eight articles that were allegedly misused. However, Fin24 claimed that the aggregation Moneyweb was describing was very common and not infringing.

Now the court back has ruled that, of the eight articles that Moneyweb has claimed were infringing, only one was actually plagiarized. The judge has also ordered Moneyweb to pay 70% of of the Media24’s legal costs following this decision.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.