> I doubt you could find any member of the public who would say "Yes" if asked "Should research you paid for cost you money to read?".

Isn't that a claim that the public may have against the researchers, rather than against journals? A journal is merely _offering_ a publishing service, and the public may, if they deem that service unacceptable, demand of the researchers that they do not use it.

> and the public may, if they deem that service unacceptable, demand of the researchers that they do not use it.

Many hiring requirements for researchers is that they have a published paper in X journal. Usually these journals are run by Elsevier, who takes copyright from the researchers. Are suggesting that the public lobby universities to change their hiring practices? (In which case you had better have a good alternative, otherwise you'll most likely be laughed off)

Anyway, your putting the burden on the public feels like just another way of saying "Someone else should do it". You're a member of the public, have you set up anything to demand that researchers not publish in certain journals?

There is no rule (lobbied-for or otherwise) that says that publishers can put publicly-funded research behind a paywall. That they can is simply a result of the fact that all creative works are copyrightable, and people are free to publish copyrighted work on freely-negotiated terms.

If you asked the public "should there be a special law excluding scientific articles from copyright protection," I suspect most people would say "no." Sometimes the public agrees with the general principles of a law, but disagrees with specific applications. In those cases, we give precedence to the legal principles, not the public's opinion on a specific situation.

It's descriptive, not prescriptive. Rayiner isn't endorsing the law itself, he's just telling you how it operates. People often seem to have trouble distinguishing between positive statements ('this is how things work') and normative statements ('this is how things ought to work.')

I agree with you that the laws are corrupt and should be changed, but that's going to involve refactoring the entire legal system on different operating principles, which is a radical change. IT's important to understand that this isn't one bad decision by a court or something that can fixed with a patch. Are you up for such a gargantuan task?

We don't need to rewrite anything.

Instead, just start breaking laws that are corrupt, like copyrite laws, and eventually they will be unenforceable.

Copyright laws are already mostly unenforceable against individuals.

Laws only work because society mostly follows them. The ones that people DON'T follow, may as well not even exist.

Careful with this. Having a number of laws people ignore can lead to situations where all of a sudden the existing power structure starts to enforce them arbitrarily (usually against political opponents and/or an 'out' grou p).

USC 2257 compliance comes to mind. With that on the books, a nebulous definition of what it means to be compliant and no precedent for interpretation, I'd hate to be in the adult industry when any administration decides to start enforcing it.

In case anybody else doesn't recognize this, it's the law stating that porn producers must maintain proof-of-age documentation of their performers (at least that's what I think it means). Something like that anyway.

This exactly. The law is a lot like the formal description of an algorithm that processes data. The courts and lawyers are the implementation, and the way in which people behave is the data being fed into the implementation. Overload even a good implementation and it will probably crash.