4 ms·

A capitalist would only complain if a government was the pirate. An individual pirate (group) is just a disrupting competitor to one type of business.

• incompatible 9y ago
  Not really, since the system has been set up with the journal articles designated as intellectual property, unauthorised access to that property is treated as theft, regardless who is doing it.
  • gowld 9y ago
    That's orthogonal to capitalism, which is simply the economic activity of extracting rent from a resource ("capital") the capitalist controls.
    • incompatible 9y ago
      If articles weren't treated as capital, there'd be no place for capitalism as far as I can see. The articles would just be hosted on an archive.org / Wikimedia / arXiv - style website, and Sci-Hub already shows it can be done on a shoestring budget. But that would be communism (I suppose) and I was asking if anyone was defending capitalism in this instance.
      • icelancer 9y ago
        Styles of economic structure have nothing to do with how research is disseminated.
• gowld 9y ago
  You are conflating "capitalist" with "anarchocapitalist"