Carl Malamud: Who May Swim in the Ocean of Knowledge? - The Wire

"Students should be able to access materials they need to educate themselves with, with the full support of their institutions, instead of being forced to fend for themselves in the wilds of the Internet....

In India, the principle that copyright does not apply for materials used in the course of instruction was recently affirmed by the Delhi high court in the Delhi University copy shop case. The Rameshwari Photocopy Shop is located on the premises of Delhi University, and was selling students course packs with copies of journal articles. At the behest of three large publishers, the shop was raided by armed police and charged with high crimes for violating copyright. After an intervention by an association of students and an association of academics pointed to the “for the purposes of instruction” exception to the copyright, the court said no wrongs had been committed. The right to education triumphed over the baseless claims of the publishers.

Despite this principle of law, students in India are being forced to go to Sci-Hub in Russia to find the materials they need to educate themselves, and forcing them to do so is a wrong being committed against the students. Students should be able to access these materials with the full blessing and support of their institutions and professors instead of being forced to fend for themselves in the wilds of the Internet. I believe this situation should be changed.

The database I used to look for works of the US government contained 60,179,000 journal articles, which is about 89% of the contents of Sci-Hub. That database, which is housed on 16 disk drives, each with a capacity of eight terabytes, is now in India in a secure location...."