> To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
You may disagree with that conclusion, but there's 200+ years of belief that it's possible to be "for the public good" and be covered under copyright which restricts redistribution. The short term loss is outweighed by the long term gain, or so the belief holds.
Bear in mind that the copyright term back then was decades shorter than it is now.
That said, grant organizations are turning towards requiring publication either in an open access journal, or by having papers restricted for only a short time, rather than the full length of copyright.
1. It doesn't promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts
2. 120 years since creation or 95 years since publication for corporations, or the life of the author plus 70 years is not what I would call particularly "limited Times".
There may be 200+ years of belief in copyright, but things have significantly changed in the last several thirty years. Copyright doesn't make as much sense as it used to, and though openness and transparency has always been supported in theory (and in practice by a minority) movements that support Open Source over a range of disciplines far greater than just software are now quite significant. Whilst it predates the Internet in it's current form, the current web and other global distribution mechanisms powered by the Internet have radically changed a lot of people's views about freedom of expression and ideas.
I have a hard time empathizing with an argument which, with the change of a few ephemeral names, Mad Libs style, could have been said at any time in the last 200 years.
The statement "thing have significantly changed in the last several thirty years" has been true for centuries. People in the the 1950s, or 1910s, or 1870s, could and likely did say the same thing.
Nor is your rhetoric about "openness and transparency" unique to these last two decades. Look to the populists and muckrakers from around 1900s as effective proponents of that. Look to the newspapers of the late 1800s, when the Linotype made it possible to have cheap newspapers, and look to the growth of wire services and the telephone, radio, and television, as recent examples of other technologies which have "radically changed a lot of people's views about freedom of expression and ideas."
I do argue against the meaningfulness of your comments, given the judgement in Eldred, and given the last 250 years of incessant technological change. I also think you, like many, see the near history with a much better focus than the further past. But that is not a character flaw.
In the 1970s, after the Watergate hearings and the new FOIA and Sunshine laws, people again could have, and likely did, say that it was also a level of openness and transparency which had never before been seen.
Your essential argument seems to be "things are different now so throw out the old". But things always change, so that argument is always true, and can be therefore be used to justify anything.
Furthermore, most of these papers are available to the public, just not online.
Many libraries have copies of the works.
I do think the pricing for non-institutional clients is absurd. Paying 30 bucks just to get past the abstract is nuts.