Library Genesis („Libgen“) provides access to documents that are otherwise only available behind paywalls. They make for-pay articles available for free, without having the license to do so. In other areas this is called „piracy“, e.g. in software, music, or video.

This is Copyright infringement, which is in most countries a violation of civil law. In Russia, the home of lib.gen.rus, copyright infringement is usually only prosecuted when Russian companies are affected. But even that is not guaranteed, and Russian enterprises have similar problems fighting Russian piracy as US companies have in their country.

There’s an ongoing battle over access to information on one side, and on the other people who don’t care how much damage they do or who they have to steal from if they can make a nickel.

You can tell from that where I stand. Publicly funded research is not the property of the people publishing the journal. You can’t steal all the water from a river that runs across your land, and you don’t own ideas you didn’t generate, even if you printed them.