comment_7171

"Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge."

That may have been true in the beginning but the blog post says:

"In 2014, I copied articles collected by Libgen to create Sci-Hub's own database. I did not fork Libgen: only the papers PDF files were copied. Then I configured new servers to serve these files to Sci-Hub users.

Today Sci-Hub uses it's own servers to store research papers. However all new articles downloaded by Sci-Hub are mirrored to Library Genesis databases too. Libgen also publishes torrents to download these papers."

"... but it seems like if anything happens to her sci-hub will die."

This article in Science suggests otherwise:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/04/whos-downloading-pira...

"Even if arrested, Elbakyan says Sci-Hub will not go dark. She has failsafes to keep it up and running, and user donations now cover the cost of Sci-Hub's servers. She also notes that the entire collection of 50 million papers has been copied by others many times already. "[The papers] do not need to be downloaded again from universities.""

The Wikipedia page says says she has had default judgments entered against her in the United States for civil offenses. If I am not mistaken extradition requires criminal offenses, and usually only a limited number of offenses are deemed serious enough to be "extraditable". It also requires an extradition treaty. Does her country of residence have an extradition treaty with the United States?

A Nature article some years ago mentioned she has no assets in the United States. The plaintiffs are therefore unlikely to ever collect any of the $15 million in damages.