5 ms·

Arguing the frivolity of Hollywood movie piracy is not terribly hard. Would you apply the same reasoning to academic research paper and/or textbook piracy?

• tedunangst 11y ago
  People certainly complain about closed access academic journals, but they whine about the "MAFIAA" ten or a hundred times as much. When the situation changes and the principal complaint about copyright overlords is about textbooks, then that can become a good place to start the discussion.
  • joesmo 11y ago
    That's ridiculous. Just because the idiot masses aren't complaining about it, doesn't mean it's not a huge problem. At least one person, Aaron Swartz, has already committed suicide after being targeted and threatened by academic copyright enforcers. Some of that information was funded with public money too.
• tptacek 11y ago
  No. Those are real problems. But their solution has nothing to do with copyright law. In both cases, the problems you're talking about are collusive relationships between academic institutions and publishers. Collusion is its own problem, and yours are just two examples out of many. Schools shouldn't require textbooks that cost $120/copy, and they shouldn't pressure associate professors to publish in journals that charge exorbitant fees or refuse authors the right to re-post their own papers. What we should not do is root-and-branch transform copyright law in the hopes that among all the disruption that creates, maybe something good will come out of it in academia.