Cloudfare has received a ruling from a federal judge in the New York southern district mandating the global CDN provider to provide information about users who accessed science and other academic papers protected with copyright.

The ruling filed on Oct. 20 orders the company to comply with whenever a subpoena is issued. The ruling was made following a lawsuit filed by Elsevier is known for its scientific and technical publications and materials online. The publisher complained that libgen.io and bookfi.org, both open access hubs, committed copyright infringement.

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However, evidence revealed that the publisher "is unable to identify the operators" and "true location of the computer servers" that host the above-mentioned websites.

Judge Robert Sweet ruled on the necessity for an "absent identifying information" which requires Cloudfare to disclose all details necessary for the commencement of the investigation to locate the domain registrants.

Cloudflare is also mandated to disclose the domain operators of Bookfi, Libgen and other pirate websites included in the lawsuit filed by the publisher.

Scientific and academic papers have been circulating online through hubs that offer free download. In 2015, in an interview with software developer Alexandra Elbakyan, she said that "Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research." She emphasized that "everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that's absolutely legal." Elbakyan ran Sci-Hub, an academic portal that served 200,000 download requests daily.

Last year, the New York district court ordered Sci-Hub, BookFi, and LibGen to shut down. Despite this, many databases remain online including The Pirate Bay.

Elsevier has been receiving criticisms from users complaining about the company's overpriced products and deals. In fact, a group of scientists filed a petition called "Cost of Knowledge" in 2012 that bashes the publisher for its restriction of free access to information, especially in the academic and scientific community.

Cloudflare serves millions of websites around the world offering hosting ad DDoS protection service.

A spokesperson for the company said "the plaintiff forwarded a subpoena to us on Friday. We intend to respond to the subpoena with the information available to us, that's our policy. Our policy also directs that we notify the customer about this prior to providing the information." It was also cleared that the company was not part of the complaint and did not receive any notice of the proceeding.

The involvement of Cloudflare is simply as a third-party in the case, ZDNet reported.