Is the Pirate Queen of Scientific Publishing in Real Trouble This Time?
4th July 2021
It’s been a rough few months for Sci-Hub, the beloved outlaw repository of scientific papers. In January its Twitter account, which had more than 180,000 followers, was permanently suspended. In response to a lawsuit brought by publishers, new papers aren’t being added to its library. The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. There are rumors of an FBI investigation.
And yet Alexandra Elbakyan, the 32-year-old graduate student who founded the site in 2011, seems more or less unfazed. I spoke with her recently via Zoom with the assistance of a Russian translator. Elbakyan, who is originally from Kazakhstan, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and coded Sci-Hub herself. She lives in Moscow now and is studying philosophy at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Back when she started the site, which offers access to north of 85 million papers, she didn’t expect to be fending off lawsuits and dodging investigations a decade on.
There is no such thing as ‘intellectual property’. The definition of ‘property’, both in law and in fact, is something that when one entity is using it other entities are necessarily excluded from using it, within which definition neither ideas nor information will fit. ‘Intellectual property’ is an artificial construct created an enforced by government, originally with the best of intentions, but which has been leveraged by rent-seekers (e.g. ‘patent trolls’, Disney Corp.) to squeeze money out of people without needing to work for it. (This is what enables corporations to buy up the rights to ideas that would hurt their profits and bury them — not my definition of progress, although it certainly fits that of the bureaucracy.)