Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And lifted that ban after a number of humble petitions in Russian social media asking her to change her mind.
To represent everything that is good about the internet, Sci-Hub should have been impersonal. Like archive.org perhaps, or pubmed, or thepiratebay. Unfortunately, it is not.
But it's definitely a good thing we have it, anyway.
All websites have founders and personality. Since you mention the PirateBay, they were a team with a rather snarky sense of humour. Archive.org is run by a foundation. There are always people and there's always legal responsibility.
In any case, Sci-Hub is really "everything that is good about the internet" because it's a way to make scientific knowledge accessible anywhere to anyone, in a way that was never possible before. The benefit to scholars and students in poor countries is enormous.
And considering just how disgustingly parasitic the scientific publishers have become, Elbakyan is probably the closest to a XXIst century Robin Hood, much more so than the Piratebay founders, actually.
There is something wrong with a service when access to it is conditional on the opinion about its founder voiced by some part of the population of a country. I can’t but feel that it goes against the spirit of freedom and empowerment that _is_ everything that’s good about the internet.
(I do not dispute the usefulness of SciHub, or the good that it’s doing for the netizens, or maybe for society in general. I’m just saying that it has this one thing against it, and that, for being a representative of everything that’s good, it’s pretty important.)
> To represent everything that is good about the internet, Sci-Hub should have been impersonal.
despite the fact that blocking people is "wrong", the good thing about the internet is that it's _allowed_! The internet isn't built on some moral/ethics - it shouldn't have one. It should remain something that anyone can get on, anyone can do anything on, and noone has the power to dictate behaviour.
As far as I can tell the storage is quite centralized. At least I remember them allegedly moving all their porcelain to Canada when that elephant entered the room...
Most items on Archive.org have torrent files, so there's some degree of (potential) decentralization. They run their own tracker, but in principle the torrents could live on via DHT. Most are poorly seeded, however.
They also have multiple backups in other locations.
Sci-Hub has a founder. A founder that may be sometimes be a benevolent dictator, and sometimes not. For example, very recently, this very founder got offended by Russian social media, in which some academics said something unflattering about her, and a biologist apparently named a newly discovered species of parasitic wasp after her. So she blocked Sci-Hub for all Russian IPs. For about a week. And lifted that ban after a number of humble petitions in Russian social media asking her to change her mind.
To represent everything that is good about the internet, Sci-Hub should have been impersonal. Like archive.org perhaps, or pubmed, or thepiratebay. Unfortunately, it is not.
But it's definitely a good thing we have it, anyway.