[owlbite]

> If you get it from the author you've no more idea whether it's infringing copyright (in UK, it's more liberal with Fair Use under the USC) than if you get it from scihub.

It's normally standard academic journal licensing terms that the author is permitted to distribute the work in pre-print form on a person-to-person basis.

[pbhjpbhj]

The point is though that the license is private and not available, the author might have right to publish to scihub, or scihub might have the right some other way (eg gov funding forces author to publish openly), one doesn't know either way.