Sci-hub is truly a modern-day Library of Alexandra. I hope the modern day counterparts of Julius Caesar fail.
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We used to say the same thing about Gigapedia (later library.nu) and had the same sentiment about Smiley (the admin).
And similarly about Grooveshark.
The truth is that, these types of things always come to an end. It is of utmost importance and urgency for the Sci-hub infrastructure to be made distributed and resilient.
This make me thing, could it be possible to set up a Smart Contract in some blockchain to achieve a similar thing? (I understand that this works by using user/passwords provided by some people, so it may not be feasible given the easiness to look at the information). That way the system will be very resilient given the nature of blockchain.
Nevertheless, I think I give more merit to Library Genesis. Even though the concept of Sci-Hub is very good, it is mainly a proxy... whereas Library Genesis actually is saving human knowledge.
"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."
There's a pretty long history of technical efforts to achieve censor resistance, of which Ross Anderson's 1996 "Eternity Service" is probably the most influential. I'm not very hopeful, but it would be cool to see something like it come into existence.
See this interesting 2004 review by George Danezis: https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/redblue.pdf
what.cd is a similar example in the music department.
what.cd was private and invite only though with strict seeding policies.