You’ll probably have heard about Sci-Hub. This site was set up by Alexandra Elbakyan with the intention of making as many copyrighted journal articles as possible available for free, and I would have to say that this goal has been realized. Current figures are over 48 million articles, which means what you think it means: pretty much all of Elsevier, etc., pirated.

There is, naturally, a legal battle going on (here’s Elbakyan making her case). I’m not happy with either side of the argument here, though. Too many of the people on Sci-Hub’s end seem to be reasoning along the lines of “It’s like, knowledge, and it should be, like, free”. That’s a bit unfair, but not as unfair as you’d think. The problem is, authors really did enter into a contract with these publishers, who would publish their manuscripts and charge for access. Those agreements may or may not have been a good idea, or may have made more sense some years ago, or may still make sense but need to be modified for the world of online publishing, and so on and so on. But as much as I dislike many of the scientific publishing houses, I still can’t endorse the wholesale theft of their entire databases.

Which is what this is, unfortunately. I agree that the current model of science publishing is Not Good, and that the pricing for reading individual articles often seems downright rapacious. The model for many years has been We Have It And You Don’t, and many publishers have made squeezing their library customers their entire business model. Some readers will be saying “Well, yeah, sounds like the industry you work for, too, doesn’t it?” But there are differences. For one, patents expire, but copyrights (under US law) are very different. Copyright has been extended, and extended, and extended, pretty much on schedule with the possible move of the earlier Walt Disney material into the public domain. (The way that the Disney people made their fortune off adaptations of public-domain works just makes this even more irritating). But other publishers have been happy (overjoyed, even) to go along every time. There basically is no “public domain” in the US any more, in the sense of a creative commons that formerly protected works move into. Unless explicitly placed there by authors, what’s in the public domain is what was frozen there years ago (pre-1923 works, or pre-1964 works whose copyrights were not renewed, for the most part).

So while drug patents expire 20 years after filing, which in practice means far less than that after a drug has actually reached the market, copyright just rolls on and on and on. It’s currently set to 70 years after the death of the author, or (in the case of works-for-hire, as in scientific papers, 95 years after publication). The situations could not be more different: drugs that are selling billions of dollars a year routinely face their patent expirations, five to ten years after they hit the market, and their prices drop as the generic manufacturers take over. But creative works produced at the same times as those drugs will still be under copyright protection long after all of us are dead. We have Rep. Sonny Bono to thank for the current state of the law, although it would have been someone else if it hadn’t been him. He stated that he believed that the proper length for copyright protection should be “forever”, but couldn’t quite codify that into a bill.

I think that US copyright law is a travesty. And I think that Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and all the other big scientific publishers have been living off a business model that depends on authors sending them material that (these days) they could otherwise publish for free, and then charging customers forever to see it. That’s a bit of a travesty, too, although you can always make the argument for the value of editorial effort and curation. (That breaks down, though, when you start looking at some of the Elsevier journals, among others). So what do I think about Sci-Hub? I think it’s wrong.

That’s because I can’t just defend the property rights of people I like, or when it’s to my own advantage. The law is stupid and annoying and counterproductive, but it’s also the law, and if I’m fine with wholesale violation of it then I have no real defense if Alexandra Elbakyan next decides that she wants my car. (I trust she doesn’t). I think that copyright law should be revised, and I think that the business of scientific publishing needs to change. But all of these things, and all the steps involved, can be accomplished (in theory) through the actions of elected officials, business owners, authors, and customers. Some of these changes are already underway, and I’m fine with letting the messy process continue to see what we end up with.

And as much as I might enjoy, emotionally, the idea of some publishers squirming as they see their databases made available for free, I can’t let those feelings blind me to the larger problems with doing that. People I don’t agree with have the right to speak their opinions. Businesses I don’t like have the right to keep their legally obtained property, even if I don’t like their business models. But Sci-Hub should serve as a warning, as if yet another warning were needed, of just how fragile those models are.