> nobody will make the effort afterwards to make good standards That's not true. If 3000 people a year would have paid you $100 for access over the next 20 ye

> nobody will make the effort afterwards to make good standards That's not true. If 3000 people a year would have paid you $100 for access over the next 20 years, that's $300,000, which as a future income stream has some PV X. You'll be indifferent [1] between collecting the trickle of revenue from customers paying the paywall, and a one-time lump sum from the government of X [2]. [1] You'll be indifferent by definition. Because you'd say "Yes please" to a lump sum of $1 trillion, "No thanks" to a lump sum of $1, and PV is defined to be the crossover point where your answer changes. [2] If you have a discount rate of 5%, then X ~= $300,000 / 1.05^10 or so, depending on how front-loaded the payments are and how much you care about payments more than 20 years in the future. > quite unfair in fact If the government pays you less than X, in theory it's unconstitutional, plain and simple. If the legal system doesn't accept your projected revenue, or discount rate, or you have to pay the lawyers and expert witnesses too much to legally establish the basis for those calculations...well then, the problem isn't the government taking your document to make it part of the law. The problem is the legal system is too inefficient or unreasonable, which has a different set of fixes (e.g. make laws about what calculations the government has to use in this situation, and make the government pay the plaintiff's attorney fees if the case is sufficiently clear-cut instance of "the government didn't follow its own official rules and this should never have gotten to court in the first place")