A free market is a “market in which trade is unregulated by government; an economic system free from government intervention.”[1] Copyright is a monopoly enforc

A free market is a “market in which trade is unregulated by government; an economic system free from government intervention.”[1] Copyright is a monopoly enforced by the government on the use and distribution of an original work.[2] The tool we use for academic publications is copyright, not the free market. The free market outcome is Sci-Hub. The monopoly-enforced-by-the-government outcome is Elsevier, the RIAA, the MPAA, rent-seeking by the aforementioned organizations, proprietary software, and DRM. The fundamental problem is indeed that we use the wrong tool to solve the problem of academic publication. We should use the free market, instead of government-enforced regulation. [1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_market https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/free_market [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusive_right