It's important to have both running in parallel. The more that Sci-Hub becomes normalized, the more people wonder why it's illegal in the first place. When you have a pirate site which the content creators themselves endorse and use, it really serves to highlight how broken the existing academic IP system is.

I'm not arguing that the system isn't broken although not all content creators endorse and use Sci-Hub.

Can you link to a public post of one such individual, which is also not connected to a publication?

I'm not sure what you mean by "not connected to a publication", but you can consider me one such individual and this is a public post.

> It's possible to support and encourage free access to scientific knowledge while not supporting IP infringement.

Not even theoretically. IP is the concept that people should be prevented from reading things without negotiating with the people who own them. So "free access" quite obviously requires that future "scientific knowledge" be excluded from IP protection, and that people who already own "scientific knowledge" be compelled and/or bribed into relinquishing their ownership.

And to expand, those options would also require the government to define what is "scientific knowledge" and what is not. Or else, I could just call my paper a satire and Elsevier could become a publisher of satires.

I don't think so. You can support free access to knowledge through means other than IP infringement. For example, advocating for open access policies. Many publishers agreements allow authors to post a version of the same publication on their personal website. Making that process easier and indexing those results to make it easier to find freely available versions of published work is another way to encourage access.

Judging by your response, I think you misunderstood me. I asked "Is NOT [emphasis added] supporting IP infringement...".

I think there are many people who believe that this knowledge should be out there regardless of potential copyright violations.

It seems I did misunderstand. In that case, my answer would be that I think you can support both IP infringement and free and open access to scientific knowledge even if that is not my personal position.

I don’t think anyone would argue you can’t do both. But it does seem that people in this thread are arguing that you can further free and and open access knowledge more effectively by disregarding the potential copyright infringement. If someone feels that by disregarding the potential lawlessness, they are able to do more good overall, would you consider it unreasonable for that person to support a project like scihub?

It's not up to me to dictate the morality of others. Although I could see such an action as reasonable even though I disagree.

I don’t think it’s “dictating morality” in so far as “seeing the big picture”. If your goal is to spread knowledge as effectively as possible, why limit yourself by the very rules working against you? I mean I can understand self-preservation but what else? The laws in question aren’t really about morality anyway.

> If your goal is to spread knowledge as effectively as possible, why limit yourself by the very rules working against you?

This is assuming that spreading knowledge as effectively as possible is the only goal. Even if you take a utilitarian approach to ethics, I doubt anyone has this as their only goal.

> The laws in question aren’t really about morality anyway.

I think what is and isn't related to morality is at least somewhat subjective.