"Elbakyan’s work has been the subject of legal and ethical controversy. In 2017, a New York district court awarded $15 million in damages to Elsevier, a leading science publisher, for copyright infringement by Sci-Hub and other sites...
Sci-Hub
has made millions of documents available to users around the world,
said Andrew Pitts, the managing director of PSI, an independent group
based in England that advocates for legitimate access to scholarly
content.
Pitts
said there are 373 universities in 39 countries “that have suffered an
intrusion from Sci-Hub,” which he defined as “using stolen credentials
to illegally enter a university’s secure network.” More than 150 of the
institutions are in the United States, Pitts said...
“She
is the Kim Dotcom of scholarly publications,” said Joseph DeMarco, an
attorney in New York who represented Elsevier in its lawsuit against
Elbakyan. (Dotcom ran a famous file-sharing site that U.S. authorities
said violated copyright law.)"
