The writer has to constatly remind me that running the proxy is a crime, but using it - even if she knows that it's not the legitimate way to get the information- is not.
This may be true, still I don't like the tone, as clearly sci-hub is providing the huge value to people, not her.
I wouldn't be surprised if some life saving drugs would be developed and used in practice faster because of sci-hub.
I use sci-hub - others can decide for themselves to use it - but I'm not going to say others should think it is okay or not okay if I use it - the value judgements of most other people regarding my actions is not something that I care about a lot.
Seems like it'd be difficult to precisely estimate the effect of open literature on advancing education, research, and development efforts.
Back when I was a student, we had access to a lot of journals -- but not all of them. And to use them, we had to connect through a laggy VPN to the university, as we often traveled; sometimes it was down. And then when we worked with industrial partners, we couldn't just email them relevant papers as that'd have been illegal. And we couldn't even just email each other papers, as I think the terms-of-use required us to independently download articles.
And, again, that was with university subscriptions! Rising students and professionals who go into industry typically can't access articles at all. Sure, if they really need a specific paper they can try to find a way, but that's a horribly inefficient way to do research; to be effective, a researcher really needs to be able to browse through the literature freely, reading lots of papers without being distracted by technical barriers.
Given that the current system slows down everyone, it's hurting all of us. All of science, technology, engineering, medicine, whatever -- it's all less than what it could've been because we're being held back.
But how do we quantify the on-going harm? How can we guess what sorts of inventions weren't made because researchers didn't have access or were fighting with a buggy VPN? How do we guess at how much education's being held back by students not knowing how to access the literature before college? What about all the damage from working professionals not being able to browse the literature related to their field?
Anyway, yeah, the article's constant references to Sci-Hub, as though it's somehow criminal, were definitely jarring. Sci-Hub feels like it should be legal based on the same sorts of arguments that make self-defense or providing emergency assistance legal.
This could very well be false: without sci-hub, people might instead use arxiv and the like; perhaps sci-hub brings journals thousands of downloads they would not have if sci-hub didn't exist.
As I don't use it I can't say if this might be accurate, though.
There was that study in EU that said piracy actually helped the game industry.
There is also what the author was commenting, sci-hub is easier to use than the legal alternative. We go tour researchers stuck in bureaucracies, to access papers funded by taxpayers! As Gabe Newel said, to fight piracy, you provide a better service (Steam was the biggest hit to game piracy, and so was Netflix for series and movies), instead of that, what we see is more control/bureaucracy being added.
edit: https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/22/eu-suppressed-study-pira... it's an old study (2013), but I doubt the situation got worse. In videogame land the greatest example is The Witcher 3, easiest game to pirate, has it was distributed without DRM, you could just copy your friends installer. It was still on the top of steam most played single player game(which requires the key to be unique), won a lot of awards, and got so much exposure that netflix has released a TV show...
Steam beats video game piracy because video game piracy requires shit like having a torrent client or having a friend who has a copy already. Video game piracy was never as easy as sci-hub.
Sci-Hub doesn't give me information for free I'd otherwise have to pay for - rather it provides information I'd otherwise have little access to.
I'm not a researcher, but download lots of articles just as general curiousity. I definitely wouldn't have $30 for each download, as I'm not profiting of it at all.