Ah yes, the flipside of the normal rule of law, where it only gets directed at the poor. Now you're saying it's OK to mug someone, as long as they're rich and wouldn't have really needed the money anyways.
What a ridiculous thing to say. I never said it was ok to mug someone because they're rich.
(1) this is an organization, not a person
(2) they're not being 'mugged' (see below), it's us that are being mugged every time we want to read about some piece of research
(3) whether or not they 'need money' isn't a factor
(4) use of the word 'mugging' implies violence, which was not applicable here
The law has long recognized that there is such a thing as 'the public good' as well as 'the public domain'. That didn't stop Disney from getting rich over stories already in the public domain and it won't stop publishers from making money on content.
There is no innate right to wall off a chunk of human heritage and claim ownership, even though lobbying power and money have distorted the balance of power substantially.
> There is no innate right to wall off a chunk of human heritage and claim ownership, even though lobbying power and money have distorted the balance of power substantially.
That I agree with, along with our problems with the public domain and copyright reform. I just don't like the reasoning couched in language about how much benefit a particular party has obtained.
E.g. we might decide that copyright period of, say, a year is hurtful and should be extended because overall (or on average) not enough benefit is obtained overall for those with copyright protection, causing an overall hurtful effect to society. But we wouldn't base that decision just on party A or B.
I understand you may simply have been using a specific example to speak for the general principle though, and if that's the case I apologize for jumping on your argument like that.
There was a mix-up between academia and the publishers, with academia's financial issues used to bolster the case against sharing this data. But in actual fact the academic institutions pay the publishers and those publishers are very wealthy.
On another note, why is there only one 'kind' of copyright? Why do the same rules that apply to work written for profit apply to work written for scientific edification? Some differentiation there would go a long way towards solving these problems.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not at all a fan of the system setup by Elsevier et al. There's a lot that can and should be done to overhaul and scale back our system of copyright and other "intellectual property" to work better for the progress of society. I'm just also not a fan of the concept of "the ends justify the means".
