Alexandra Elbakyan Quotes

For me, Sci-Hub has a value by itself, as a website where users can access knowledge. There are many websites where you can see pictures, share tweets, download music, read ebooks. And Sci-Hub is a website where you can read research articles.

I perceive Sci-Hub as a practical side of my research.

Sci-Hub arose as a tool to be used in a Russian-speaking online research community.

Providing free access to research papers on websites like Sci-Hub breaks so-called copyright law that was made to taboo free distribution of information on the Internet. That includes music, movies, documentaries, books, and research articles. Not everyone agrees that copyright law should exist in the first place.

This kid came up with Napster, and before that, none of us thought of content protection.

We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file-sharing networks.

Hollywood and the recording industry argue that current law permits the copying of songs and movies, and sharing them on the Internet. This enables young people to grow up learning how to steal.

I like their slogan 'making uncommon knowledge common' very much, but as far as I can tell Elsevier has not mastered this job well. Sci-Hub is helping them to fulfill their mission.

People feel entitled to take whatever's online without paying for it.

Sci-Hub always intended to be legal, and advocated for the copyright law to be repealed or changed, so that it will not prohibit the development of science.

I started a crowdfunding campaign on Sci-Hub to buy additional drives, and soon had my own copy of the database collected by LibGen, around 21 million papers.

The threat [of the U.S. bills SOPA and PIPA] is the inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share.

As a kid who illegally streamed 'The Daily Show' it has always been a goal of mine.

We filed suit against YouTube before the Google purchase. At the time I went after YouTube, I thought it was a small company ripping off our copyrights.

When we started making mixtapes, we were just ripping stuff off YouTube and DVDs, naively thinking that because we were putting it up for free, it was gonna be fine.

I usually kind of can't wait until my records leak. Back in the day, you could give people tapes, but you can't do that anymore, because it would be available to everyone on the planet within an hour.

I don't agree with the copyright laws and I don't have a problem with people downloading the movie and sharing it with people as long as they're not doing it to make a profit off my labor. You share things with people and I think information, and art, and ideas should be shared.

I think it's kinda funny that all these rappers that used to be gangsters and thugs are telling us not to download their music from the internet, because that's stealing. Wow talk about ironic.

Linking without permission is stealing. Period, end of story.

I'm all for file sharing. That's great - as long as people are prepared for the significant consequences. One is that music will become completely couched in advertising. That's already happened. And another is that people should be prepared to have fun with the past because the only music that can possibly be free is the music that's from the past. It costs money to make music. And if people are prepared to only have the past to listen to, then let it be free.

I wouldn't even say the internet is a gift and a curse for hip-hop. All types of music are bootlegged, including movies which are bootlegged.

I have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand, I’m concerned that the rampant downloading of my copyright-protected material over the Internet is severely eating into my album sales and having a decidedly adverse effect on my career. On the other hand, I can get all the Metallica songs I want for FREE! WOW!

The day that music is taken for free by the majority is the day that the phrase "sell out" doesn't exist any more.

People equated burning CDs with theft. That's not what burning CDs is. Theft is about acquiring the music from the Internet.

New technologies will always demand and deserve careful navigation and difficult readjustments. But the weakening or de facto abolition of copyright will not merely roil the seas, it will drain them dry. Those who would pirate what you produce have developed an elaborate sophistry to convince you that they are your victim. They aren't. Fight back.