Chronicle: Academic publisher steps up efforts to stop piracy of its online products

The Chronicle of Higher Education article describes the efforts of the American Chemical Society to protect access to its SciFinder service, which had been discovered to have been accessed by Chinese Hackers.

(Michael Dennis, vice president for legal administration and applied research at the Chemical Abstracts Service, the division that publishes SciFinder) says sellers use Taobao, a Chinese service similar to eBay, and other online marketplaces to sell SciFinder access, giving buyers hacked user names and passwords and instructions on how to remotely log in to a college Web site so that they appear to be on the campus. The database is popular with companies as well as with academics, though exactly who is buying the access is not clear.

Dennis has established that the password “leaks” come primarily from college students and professors who share their passwords with others, and eventually a hacked or phished account or email provides those passwords to others.

The article is a good example of the “hacking wars” that often go on between content owners and those who want free access to valuable content (or want to resell others’ content), and provides a good accounting of steps that CAS has taken to protect content… plus the admission that the efforts never stop, because the pirates won’t relent.

The article also mentions the downside to all this: That legitimate users are forced to jump through ever-tighter security hoops as content is more securely locked down. It seems users are rarely sympathetic to a content provider’s need to protect their content, when it means inconvenience to the users themselves.

After you read the article, spend some time in the comments that follow: There are some very good posts arguing the case for content protection, many points of which are well-known to TR regulars.