Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org?

There are plenty of real reasons to dislike Elsevier. Making up hypothetical ones only discredits the OP and adds noise.

I would love to see Elsevier try to shut down the arXiv. That might be the one thing they could do to really turn the academic community against them. They'd be dead in a week.

Perhaps the most important part of that article is the last two paragraphs mentioning the White House's request for comments on the question of public access to federally-funded scientific research. Links provided:

http://www.taxpayeraccess.org/action/action_access/11-1117.s...

http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2011-11-04/html/2011-28623.h...

Couple of other things. Elsevier is $3 billion in revenue, not $10 billion (the author must be thinking of Reed Elsevier here, Elsevier's parent company.) So really they only have something like $3 billion reasons to not let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero.

And to be clear, so far as I can tell, SOPA has almost nothing to do with arxiv.org, because arxiv.org publishes the manuscript, not the final version of the article. Elsevier's stated position is that publishing the manuscript version is not copyright infringement.

Even if SOPA passed, sure, it would be easier for Elsevier to shut down arxiv.org. But if arxiv.org started publishing the final version of articles for which Elsevier had obtained worldwide exclusive copyright, that would be copyright infringement anyway. So the key (it would seem to me) is whether arxiv.org publishes the final version of articles or not (they curenttly don't), not whether SOPA passes, that determines whether arxiv.org is to get shutdown.

And so if they did, the answer to the question "Could Elsevier shut down arxiv.org?" would be "Yes."

Right now, the answer is "No."