Barbra Streisand, Elsevier, and Sci-Hub February 17, 2016

Thirteen years ago, Kenneth Adelman photographed part of the California coastline from the air. His images were published as part of a set of 12,000 in the California Coastal Records Project. One of those photos showed the Malibu home of the singer Barbra Streisand.

In one of the most ill-considered moves in history, Streisand sued Adelman for violation of privacy. As a direct result, the photo — which had at that point been downloaded four times — was downloaded a further 420,000 times from the CCRP web-site alone. Meanwhile, the photo was republished all over the Web and elsewhere, and has almost certainly now been seen by tens of millions of people.

Last year, the tiny special-interest academic-paper search-engine Sci-Hub was trundling along in the shadows, unnoticed by almost everyone.

In one of the most ill-considered moves in history, Elsevier sued Sci-Hub for lost revenue. As a direct result, Sci-Hub is now getting publicity in venues like the International Business Times, Russia Today, The Atlantic, Science Alert and more. It’s hard to imagine any other way Sci-Hub could have reached this many people this quickly.

I’m not discussing at the moment whether what Sci-Hub is doing is right or wrong. What’s certainly true is (A) it’s doing it, and (B) many, many people now know about it.

It’s going to be hard to Elsevier to get this genie back into the bottle. They’ve already shut down the original sci-hub.com domain, only to find it immediately popping up again as sci-hub.io. That’s going to be a much harder domain for them to shut down, and even if they manage it, the Sci-Hub operators will not find it difficult to get another one. (They may already have several more lined up and ready to deploy, for all I know.)

So you’d think the last thing they’d want to do is tell the world all about it.