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Futurism has done an interview over e-mail with Alexandra Elbakyan who founded Sci-Hub ten years ago. Over that time, it has become both widely used and well-stocked, having picked up momentum in 2016. There are now over 87 million research articles in its database, though not evenly distributed over academic disciplines.
As of September, Sci-Hub has officially existed for 10 years — a milestone that came as a lawsuit to determine if the website infringed on copyright laws sits in India’s Delhi High Court. Just a few months prior, Elbakyan tweeted that she was notified of a request from the FBI to access her data from Apple. And before that, the major academic publisher Elsevier was awarded $15 million in damages after the Department of Justice ruled that Sci-Hub broke copyright law in the U.S.
But that ruling can’t seem to touch Sci-Hub. And Elbakyan remains absolutely unrepentant. She advocates for a future in which scientific knowledge is shared freely, and she’s confident that it’s coming.
Futurism caught up with Elbakyan to hear what’s next. Over email, she explained her vision for the site’s future, her thoughts on copyright law, and more. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The article goes on to report that she had expected copyright law to be corrected long before so much time had passed. In many ways Sci-Hub can be seen as a form of push back against the academic publishing houses which are infamous for abusive practices and pricing. The cost of research, writing, editing, peer-review, and more are all borne by the researchers and their institutions with little beyond distribution borne by the publisher. The big publishing houses then sell access back to the same researchers and institutions at rates that a small and decreasing number can afford.
Previously:
(2021) Large Publishers Aim to Own the Entire Academic Research Publishing Stack
(2021) Sci-Hub Pledges Open Source & AI Alongside Crypto Donation Drive
(2018) Swedish ISP Punishes Elsevier for Forcing It to Block Sci-Hub by Also Blocking Elsevier
(2018) Sci-Hub Proves That Piracy Can be Dangerously Useful
(2017) Sci-Hub Bounces from TLD to TLD
(2015) Elsevier Cracks Down on "Pirate" Science Search Engines
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday October 12 2021, @12:50AM (2 children)
> The cost of research, writing, editing, peer-review, and more are all borne by the researchers and their institutions with little beyond distribution borne by the publisher.
Those are good points, which show academic publishers in an even worse light. Another good point is the impracticabilty of locking away knowledge. The various means to enforce ignorance, ranging from DRM to police raids and imprisonment, are all ridiculous, either easily circumvented, or the stuff of the dreams of the worst fascists. Knowledge cannot be hoarded. Yet all those points are secondary to the most important, fundamental principle, which that knowledge should not be hoarded.
Restricting the dissemination of knowledge is anti-educational. At least some censorship, such as Bowdlerization, pretends to a higher moral calling however much it fails to meet its goals as well as cause unintended bad consequences. Copyright, in contrast, has become censorship for the venal purpose of mere rent seeking. Yeah, yeah, copyright is supposed to provide the means by which content is both assigned a fair value and the originators of that content are compensated, but that, everyone should realize, hasn't worked as intended. If publishers were more reasonable, it would not change that they still pretend to ownership of knowledge and art. A nice, gilded cage is still a cage. A nice, kindly slave owner is still a slave owner.
There are other good reasons to dump copyright. Not least is that we now have the means to build a better system. The same instrument by which copyright is laid low, the Internet, can be the foundation of a new system, based on crowdfunding and patronage. A big negative of copyright is that it reinforces individualistic thinking. What does it mean for a work of art to be considered original? The fact is, all works of art owe a great deal to the efforts of millennia, to create languages, writing systems, cultural traditions, discoveries, inventions, and now, the ability to record and copy as never before. Yet artists seem to feel they deserve all the profit from a work of art, while they, in oblivious shamelessness, use tools in a commodity, work-for-hire manner. They also all work largely alone. Yes, sometimes a few will collaborate, but the lone wolf artist is more common. How much better our art could be, with more collaboration, who can say? Maybe someday fairly soon, we will know. And, the novelist does not pay the descendants of the inventors of pen and paper, nor of the computers upon which word processing software runs, nor of typewriters from which keyboards clearly descended. Nor does the novelist pay the descendants of the pioneers of whatever genre, or meme, or any other plot element, device, or storytelling tradition they use. But they expect society to pay them on that basis?
Copyright warps everyone's thinking, in more ways than this pandering to wrongheaded individualistic thinking. The art of our culture is soaked clear through with possessive thinking. One example of this is the movie Twister, in which the protagonist is all butt hurt that someone else is using "his" idea. And his feelings are not entirely unjustified either, thanks to the overly simplistic system of awarding all credit to one. Copyright pushes our emotional buttons, triggering our fears of loss. A great many stories have melodrama based upon the loss of or lack of precious knowledge that could never happen if the authors really understood just how very easy copying is. Many artists, perhaps most, are constantly crying that they're being robbed. And then there are the sorts of people who burn books, perhaps out of a sense that it is not utterly impossible to gain possession of every single existing print copy and the typed or handwritten original of some work, and burn them all. It shouldn't be that way, and it doesn't have to be that way. In a good system, artists should be happy that people want to copy what they created.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @01:05AM (1 child)
> Copyright, in contrast, has become censorship for the venal purpose of mere rent seeking.
Think of the children! And the grandchildren! And a few great-grandchildren! Of published works. How will they feed themselves if their ancestor's work does not keep generating sweet royalties?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 12 2021, @01:09AM
Tell them cocksuckers to drive amazon delivery trucks.