As a researcher, I am very happy that recently all the conferences and journals we usually publish to champion open access publishing. Due to this, all my work is currently FOSS and all the papers open access. That is a great change to the papers of the past where you have to have an affiliation to a university to get access to a paper and sometimes even that is not enough.

The ghost of Aaron Swartz, is that you?

Here's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo (including an interview with the great Alexandra Elbakyan).

Cory Doctorow recently wrote about this in some detail (incl. helpful links): https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.

The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.

Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won't have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.

I think the problem is allowing corporations to own the copyright. We should make it so that only the original creator of something can copyright it for ten years.

Printing and binding is expensive, not to mention a waste of paper, you can't really expect them to front that cost IMO. He should have just given you the PDF instead printing it.

It truly baffles me how teachers could morally justify that. I would immediately think "Wait, if I make my students buy my textbook for the unit, I'm just fleecing them and they have no choice in the matter." and you would naively hope that anyone else would also feel the same way.

But how else is he going to pay for his yacht.... I mean, pay to feed his children.... Yeah, that's relatable with millennials and zoomers that are so far in debt and earning so little that they can't afford kids, right?

https://singlelogin.re/

Here i was hoping that it had popped back up.