Comodo withdrew Sci-Hub security certificates

“The Pirate Bay for Scientists”, as Sci-Hub service is sometimes called for several years now, has been trying to deal with major scientific publishers. The goal of the struggle is to give the right to scientists, students and in general to anyone who is interested in science to read the necessary scientific articles for free. At the moment, many specialized materials of interest for a particular group of scientists are published only in scientific journals, subscriptions to which cost a lot of money.

The amounts requested by academic publishers for subscribing to one or several publications often exceed the capabilities of not only individual scientists, but also smaller universities. As a result, the most valuable materials are closed for many who want to get acquainted with them. Some scientists believe that this situation is extremely harmful for science and they are trying to deal with the current state of affairs. One of the services that helps to change the situation with the availability of scientific materials is Sci-Hub, which was repeatedly written to Geektimes, a couple of years ago an interview with the author of the idea Alexandra Elbakyan was also published here.

The Sci-Hub base now contains millions of scientific documents, including articles and books. It is clear that the scientific publishing houses, which own the rights to all these materials, are not very satisfied with the current situation. In fact, they have been fighting with Elbakyan for several years. Lawsuits are regularly organized, which Alexandra loses, but they do not give anything, Sci-Hub continues to work.
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They fight with the service of free scientific articles not only of publishers, but also of publisher associations. For example, the American Chemical Society (ACS), an organization that is one of the largest sources of academic publications in the field of chemistry. Recently, ACS won a court against Elbakyan, which ruled that the respondent would pay a fine of $ 4.8 million. According to the court, ACS lost in the form of losses incurred by Sci-Hub’s activities, both direct and indirect.

After winning the court, the organization had plans for further struggle with Elbakyan and her creation. So, the representatives of ACS decided to prohibit Sci-Hub partners from working with this resource. We are talking about domain registrars, hosting companies, search services. By all means copyright holders are trying to block access to Sci-Hub. The organization's enthusiasm is partially fueled by the fact that Sci-Hub has now begun to play a very important role - so important that the paid model of the work of scientific publishing houses is under threat .

Rightholders have achieved a number of successes - for example, permission to pick up Sci-Hub domains, both old and those that may be registered in the future. Domains such as Sci-Hub.hk and Sci-Hub.nz continue to work, but their users return an error "NET :: ERR_CERT_REVOKED".



In other words, Sci-Hub domain certificates are revoked by Comodo CA, the largest certification authority in the world. The company did not do it of its own accord, but according to a court order, which hardly anyone can ignore without incurring problems. "Comodo CA is obliged to act in accordance with court decisions and in accordance with the law," - said the representative of Comodo. In total, four safety certificates were withdrawn.

Representatives of Comodo did not disclose additional details of what happened, but ACS confirmed that the revocation of certificates is a direct consequence of the court decision: “This action is a response effort to protect the intellectual property of ACS”.

Sci-Hub does not have one or two domains, and the service can switch from one to another without any problems. At some addresses the certificate is still valid, as, for example, at sci-hub.tw .



However, Comodo is gradually withdrawing security certificates from most of the well-known domains of the “free science” service, so that a problem report will soon be issued at all addresses.

This is not the first victory of rights holders - in February, for example, the cloud service Cloudflare refused to service several domains of the service. “Cloudflare will stop providing services for domains such as sci-hub.la, sci-hub.tv, and sci-hub.tw within 24 hours,” the company said.

Currently, sci-hub.is and sci-hub.nu remain fully operational . These addresses have certificates provided by Let's Encrypt , an open certification center that is supported by Mozilla, EFF, Chrome, Private Internet Access and other technology companies.