Is it illegal for someone in the USA to access Sci-Hub? Sci-Hub self-describes as "the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers". A Russian researcher posted most of the academic research publications that are usually behind expensive paywalls. Is it illegal for people in the USA to access it? If a DA wanted to prosecute someone for going and reading things from Sci-Hub, would they have a case?
Copyright in the US is usually a civil matter. Meaning that the copyright owner can sue (typically for money damages or injunctive relief) an infringer. The criminal laws that we have are aimed at the reproducer and/or distributor. In other words, chances are that you won't get in any criminal trouble for accessing academic articles of dubious origin. But never say never. RIP Aaron Schwartz.
It might possibly be illegal. For criminal law, usually you need to obey the laws of three countries: The country you are a national of (by personality principle) The country from where you make the sale (by territoriality principle) The country that hosts the attacked interest (by territoriality principle) Then it depends on the jurisdiction (and other factors) whether the sale is legal or not. I'll use the example of my country, Czech Republic. There is a crime called "Unauthorized access to a computer system or data storage device". For example, you commit this crime by exploiting a vulnerability in a web application and copying the web owner's data on your computer. It is also codified that whoever wilfully facilitates the committing of a crime by providing the criminal with resources (such as the exploit) is considered to have also committed the crime. For this to apply, you must have known or expected that the exploit will be used to commit a crime. The courts would decide this.
It is hard to say: this article sketches the legal landscape. So-called deep linking that bypasses the main page for a site is not believed to be infringement, following the reasoning of Perfect 10, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc., 508 F.3d 1146. The URL itself does not have the bare minimum of creativity required for copyright protection, and storing a URL on a computer is not storing the contents that it refers to, so no copy was made in violation of copyright law. It is unlikely that competing theories would develop in other US districts (there don't appear to be any at the present). However, such a link could create secondary liability for infringement, see Erickson Productions, Inc. v. Kast, where a party &quot;has knowledge of another’s infringement and (2) either (a) materially contributes to or (b) induces that infringement&quot;. If I link to a file on a pirate website, I am secondarily liable for that infringement. However, if I link to a legally-uploaded file which the author did not intend to make public, there is no infringement. Copyright law requires permission of the copyright owner, which is more than just &quot;explicit denial&quot;. The problem is that a person can put a file out there and not say one way or the other whether you have permission to copy the file. The US Copyright office says that &quot;A copyright owner must have expressly or implicitly authorized users to make retainable copies of a work by downloading, printing, or other means for the work to be considered published&quot; (let's not care at the moment whether it is important to be &quot;published&quot;). The court may infer implicit permission from a copyright owner's conduct, but there is no rule &quot;if it's on the internet, you've granted permission&quot;. A rights-owner may make a valiant but insufficient effort to block access to the work (except via a password), so in that context, the courts would infer that the rights-owner had not given permission, therefore the copying is infringing and you have secondary liability for your direct link to the material.
This kind of piracy is unfortunately common. When your copyright has been violated, your available response is to sue the infringer. Yes, this costs money, and yes, many infringers get away with it. In the Free Software/Open Source community, a couple of actors including the FSF, gpl-violations.org/Harald Welte, and the Software Freedom Conservancy have sued GPL infringers. But they can only do that for copyrights that they hold themselves. For example, the FSF holds copyright for the GNU userland, whereas Welte and Conservancy hold copyright for parts of the Linux kernel. They do not hold copyright for your software so they cannot enforce the AGPL license on your behalf. What can be done fairly easily is to file a takedown request with platforms that host the infringing content. Under various safe harbor laws including the US DMCA, a platform is not responsible if they accidentally host infringing content uploaded by users. However, the platform has to take the content down if they're notified that the content is infringing. For example, you could file a DMCA takedown request with GitHub to take down their repository, in case they are using GitHub. The drawback is that a takedown notice can be contested by the alleged infringer, in which case the content is reinstated and you would have to sue. The platform is not allowed to make its own determination about whether you or the infringer is right.
The information in telephone books is public. so are postal change-of-address records. So are records of the ownership of real estate. So are vital statistics such as birth records. So are voter registration lists -- i myself purchased a voter registration list (in digital form) for a municipality which showed people's names, addresses, and the years when they voted, when I was a political candidate for local office in NJ. It cost about $100. I believe that many states also make driver's license information available for a fee to marketers. Credit records are available for certain limited purposes, also. No doubt there are other public sources I haven't thought of. If such a site relies on public records, or other publicly available data, it is not illegal. Many such sites offer to remove names on an opt-out basis, but there is no legal requirement that sites do so. This kind of information is not considered nto be "private facts" under US tort law. Aside from opting out, if the sites provide that option, I don't think you have any recourse. One could ask the local legislature to pass a law prohibiting such sites, or making them require consent, similar to the GDPR that the EU has. But I don't know of any such law in the US to date.
It is true that any work of the US government is not subject to copyright in the United States; it may be subject to copyright abroad (the relevant law excludes US government works from US copyright protection; other countries have their own copyright laws that generally don't explicitly exclude US government works, and so the works may be copyrighted there). A government work is defined as something produced by a government employee in the course of his official duties. It doesn't include everything released by a government agency; for instance, if a contractor makes something and the contract specifies that the government gets the copyright, the work is copyrighted (since it wasn't made by a government employee). If a foreign cosmonaut or astronaut composes and sings an original song in a livestream, then NASA may not have copyright in the livestream but the foreign astronaut would have copyright in the song. That said, NASA has a page of guidelines for reuse of their media, where they say that their stuff normally isn't copyrighted unless otherwise noted. They don't make any sort of guarantee, but they suggest you'd probably be fine embedding it, at least as far as they're concerned.
The owner of IP owns the abstract thing that is protected by law (the intellectual property), and not the concrete product that relied on (illegally) using that abstraction. The person who made the thing, or to whom he sold it, owns the object. If you buy a disk with pirated or non-pirated software, you own the disk, and if you bought it legally, you probably bought a license to use the software. Using "pirated" to refer to the class of things legally manufactured (not stolen, not using stolen components) but in violation of IP law, pirated goods might be subject to seizure by the government (it would be slated for destruction), but the goods would not be the subject of a prosecution for theft. While infringement of IP rights is often called "theft", it doesn't have all of the elements of theft: you do not deprive the owner of the thing that they own.
A law has to be "broad" to include a lot of possible crimes and intent of criminals and account for the good faith of non-criminals. "Intentionally access without authorization/exceed" is actually fairly specific; "intent" is the keyword. Someone making a mistake may have intent to login, but no intent to commit a crime. Someone confused by "different pages of demo and live accounts" can easily defend their actions by pointing out that they were confused. It's up to the reasonableness of the pertinent law enforcement and prosecutors to take into account the evidence that reasonable mistakes were made by little old ladies and not charge them with a crime. And for the most part, 98% of the time, law enforcement and prosecutors are reasonable.