Alexandra Elbakyan Quotes
Scientific knowledge belongs to humanity.
While Wikipedia has not yet reached every person in the world, it has already distributed more human knowledge than any other vehicle in human history. And all at no cost to the user. It is certainly the greatest volunteer intellectual effort in history.
Although most people do not realize it, ideas cannot be copyrighted under present and traditional copyright law. The manifestation of the idea, the specific design, words, fonts, and layout can be copyrighted, but someone else can legally use and publish that idea with a different design and words.
Two days before Nagasaki was attacked by the second atomic bomb. Bohr was afraid of a nuclear arms race, and argued for the release of all scientific information. His suggestion went nowhere. There was a 50 year nuclear arms race.
This doctrine of law was settled, but in the technological and digital age some people have tried to extend the intellectual property doctrine to include some ideas if they idea is a procedure or a set of DNA instructions. Meanwhile, the legal doctrine has been and is, as stated by Brandeis in this quotation, is that new and original ideas are not intellectual property and are always in the public domain, no matter how original.
There was the beginning of a major debate in the advanced countries over the notion of copyright to protect authors and knowledge being a public property. The solution for America and most nations was to allow copyright protection for the specific expression of the knowledge but not the knowledge itself. You cannot copyright an idea or the laws of science—just the way they are expressed. Therefore all are free to discuss the knowledge and also write about it.
This is a very different view from the prevailing American legal and cultural view. The United States grants patents and copyrights even when the taxpayer has paid for much of the research and development, even when the inventor was educated by the state. The difference is an intellectual and philosophical one. America is anxious to incentivize people to create and invent and especially to encourage capital to flow to R&D. Toynbee comes from an intellectual tradition where science and technology was the finest in the world, but it was done by the well-to-do for the sake of doing it. Both approaches had been immensely success for their times, but the need for technological development is so great that we should not limit it to the people of wealth and a social class for whom money may not be a driver while it is for most others.
Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan (Russian: Алекса́ндра Аса́новна Элбакя́н, born 1988) is a Kazakhstani computer programmer and creator of the website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers without regard to copyright. According to Elbakyan, Sci-Hub has served over a billion science articles to its visitors since 2011.
