It doesn&#x27;t necessarily imply that.<p>Suppose something is funded by US taxes. It could be harder to restrict access to only citizens than to make it available to the world. For example, should a US citizen who is overseas (eg, on a 6 month sabbatical) be able to access the system?<p>Or it could be that only downloads from the geographic US are allowed, but further distribution is not prohibited.<p>Consider an existing journal article written by a US government employees. That work is in the public domain. It is not possible to infringe on the copyright (&quot;pirate&quot;) the paper because there is no copyright protection, and in the US there is no &quot;sweat-of-the-brow&quot; protection for non-creative additions like OCR&#x27;ed text added to the PDF.<p>I think it would be an excellent test case to take all of the papers from sci-hub, extract those where the author is a government employee, and have a &quot;public domain sci-hub&quot; version containing only public domain articles.<p>The lawyer bill would be rather high, so I&#x27;m not going to do it. You would likely also have to show that you were actively filtering out papers which weren&#x27;t in the public domain, and of course reply to DMCA. I can&#x27;t figure out a business model which would support that. Still, I think YouTube and similar sites show that such a site is not fundamentally illegal.