If Sci-Hub Is Piracy, What Is AI?
Why is moral outrage so selective? Sci-Hub breached copyright at industrial scale. But if Alexandra Elbakyan is a pirate for making paywalled scientific knowledge freely available, then the same scrutiny has to be applied to the modern AI economy.
Vast bodies of copyrighted human knowledge, academic writing, journalism, code, books, images, music, and research have been absorbed into commercial systems valued in the hundreds of billions.
The difference is selective outrage, capital, legal insulation, lobbying power, narrative control, and who gets to call their extraction “innovation” as opposed to piracy.
Copyright MUST be protected so that authors, researchers, publishers, artists, journalists, and creators can earn a living by enjoying that protection.
The asymmetry though is nauseating. A Kazakh researcher who breaks the paywall is called a criminal. A trillion-dollar ecosystem that ingests civilisation’s intellectual output and turns it into proprietary infrastructure is called the future.
If Elbakyan is a pirate, then the AI economy are operating with the confidence of privateers but better funded, better lawyered, and far more acceptable to the institutions whose knowledge they "pirated"
ALT LinkedIn screenshot discussing Sci-Bot, an AI-powered scientific research assistant built from millions of Sci-Hub papers, raising legal, ethical, copyright, access, and knowledge-architecture questions around paywalled research and GenAI.
ALT LinkedIn mobile screenshot continuing a post on Sci-Bot and Sci-Hub, contrasting publisher copyright protections with the argument for global access to scientific knowledge for researchers, teachers, physicians, and the public.
ALT LinkedIn screenshot showing the closing questions of a post about Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub, copyright, and democratised science, followed by a photo of a woman, Alexandra Elbakyan, in a patterned hoodie before a Russian-language knowledge backdrop.
ALT Photo of a Alexandra Elbakyan standing against a projected Russian-language backdrop referencing free knowledge, wearing a white patterned hoodie over a green top, with soft lighting and a shadowed presentation-style background.