 Alexandra Elbacan, a 20-something-year-old grad student, is operating a free, searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10 billion per year paywall of academic publishers in awe-inspiring act of altruism or a massive criminal enterprise, depending on who you ask. Now up to 60 million papers providing access to nearly all scholarly literature, v. its websites psi-hub.cc, psi-hub.io, and psi-hub.ac. Psi-hub was able to fill 99.3% of article requests all for free. A sister site, a library genesis at libgen.io, distributes scientific books and textbooks for free, more than a million of them, also illegally. Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone concluded this feature in prestigious journal Science. A survey of potential users suggests, for most it's not some grand political statement, but rather that's the only way they have access, or feel it's just so much quicker and easier. Even those who have legitimate institutional access may still choose to use psi-hub, because there's just so many fewer hoops to jump through. So you can imagine how sites like psi-hub may be filling publishers that charge for access with roaring existential panic, and they're not taking it lying down. Elsevier, the largest publisher, notorious for demanding researchers take down free copies of their own work, sued psi-hub, the Library Genesis Project, Alexandra and 99 John Doe's for copyright infringement, a willful disregard of Elsevier's rights. Kind of hard to take the moral high ground, though, when you're effectively an international arms dealer. Can you imagine a tobacco company publishing health journals? Surely the company's business mission would be impossibly confused. Would the company be in the business of killing people, or keeping them alive? But if you can't imagine that absurdity, well, welcome to Elsevier, which in addition to publishing medical journals is also involved in the global arms trade, running arms fairs where things like cluster bombs are sold, leading to medical journal editorial boards calling for a boycott of Elsevier's warmongering health-damaging business practices. In response to the lawsuit, Alexandra wrote a letter to the judge. She wanted to make it clear that not only did Elsevier not create those papers, but that they don't pay researchers a penny. So it's not like a pirated movie or song where the content creator is losing out, noting that no researcher had ever complained that she was handing out their research. In fact, scientific authors are typically thrilled when their work gets more out into the world. That's the whole point of science, to be shared and built upon. And one fell swoop, Alexandra created a portal, likely offering a greater level of access to science than any institution on earth in history, literally opening up a world of knowledge. And she's not backing down. Citing in her defense Article 27 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights that everyone should have the right to freely participate in the cultural life of a community, including sharing and scientific advancement and its benefits, she realizes she could be arrested and extradited to the US to face charges. She's fully aware that another computer prodigy turned advocate, Aaron Schwartz, was arrested on similar charges after mass downloading academic papers. Facing devastating financial penalties in jail time, Schwartz hanged himself.