A <i>long</i> time ago (even before Aaron Swartz), when I was still familiar with the active and rapidly growing filesharing community of the time, I vaguely remember reading about an effort by some of the &quot;ebookers&quot; to plant proxies in various universities&#x27; networks that would perform much the same function. I wonder what eventually became of it besides the large paper torrents that appeared, but I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if SciHub was related to that in some way. Back then, systems were far more open (as opposed to secured), and something like that was easier than it is today.