Re:We've failed: open access is winning and we must change o...
by smsm42 on Sunday September 17, 2017 @04:13AM
(#15268722)
You can look at this picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/Tom_Bell... to see what's going on with copyright. To me, this looks like clear abuse of the law - it can't be that you needed 25 years to promote progress of science in 19th century but you need 100 years now. It's clear rent-seeking, no wonder people fail to believe the moralistic preaching of the same people who buy the laws that are convenient to them.
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Re:We've failed: open access is winning and we must change o...
by fossuser on Sunday September 17, 2017 @10:20AM
(#15269701)
I think part of the difficulty is that the copyright clause argument is more nuanced to fully explain. It's easier for rights holders to loudly argue that people are stealing content and ignore the original intent of the law.
This is further complicated by rights holders having enormous amounts of money they can use to influence legislation.
It typically all comes back to the campaign finance reform Lawrence Lessing talks about in Republic Lost. I think Copyright was one of the original issues that lead to his core argument of a corrupting influence on modern US politics. Specifically the issue with the journals was what drove Aaron Swartz to try and export them all (probably to make something like scihub, but he never got there).