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I think there would still be more than enough learning materials created to learn anything you can imagine. Education is proven to be one of the thing that imp

I think there would still be more than enough learning materials created to learn anything you can imagine. Education is proven to be one of the thing that impacts your life most positively if available. Yet we gate education behind money and privilege and let publishers hold the public hostage for profit. Why? Is it worth it in your opinion?

layer8 3y ago
There are two forces at work. The existence of copyright on the one hand means that the effort of creating learning materials is split between freely available and not freely available materials. On the other hand, it creates more (financial) incentives to create learning materials. Maybe removing copyright would result in more learning materials to be freely available (or maybe not), but at the same time it may also mean that less high-quality learning materials will be produced (due to the lack of financial incentives). It’s not clear-cut in my opinion. In addition, I believe that one should have the right to monetize good material that took a lot of effort to create, without being immediately plagiarized by the rest of the world.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  That is a fair analysis, and I generally agree. But a copyright reform wouldn’t mean there is no way at all for you to monetise your great quality learning materials. In my ideal world it would mean you can monetise them for a reasonable time and after that time they become a public good. We could also come up with better monetisation strategies for such materials. But what really grinds my gears for example now my government pays private companies/publishers to produce learning materials which are then sold again to the schools - why are these materials paid for with public money aka taxes not freely available for everyone? I do agree private people should be able to monetise their work but this should never extend to materials that are paid for with taxes. Those should always be public goods. And I can see no other reason than greed and corruption why that is not the case. I am sure there are other reasons that I am missing since I’m not that deep in the field - but then again I just want everyone to be able to access the wealth of information easily that I (as someone fairly familiar with web technology) can access freely in multiple ways. As long as that is not the case I will stubbornly keep clamouring for copyright reform, happy to hear other ways to achieve that goal though.
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    Looks like you have two ideal worlds: 1. One with all content free (the original comment) 2. One with “reasonable” monetization (this comment and current situation in the real world)

layer8 3y ago

There are two forces at work. The existence of copyright on the one hand means that the effort of creating learning materials is split between freely available and not freely available materials. On the other hand, it creates more (financial) incentives to create learning materials. Maybe removing copyright would result in more learning materials to be freely available (or maybe not), but at the same time it may also mean that less high-quality learning materials will be produced (due to the lack of financial incentives). It’s not clear-cut in my opinion. In addition, I believe that one should have the right to monetize good material that took a lot of effort to create, without being immediately plagiarized by the rest of the world.

sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
That is a fair analysis, and I generally agree. But a copyright reform wouldn’t mean there is no way at all for you to monetise your great quality learning materials. In my ideal world it would mean you can monetise them for a reasonable time and after that time they become a public good. We could also come up with better monetisation strategies for such materials. But what really grinds my gears for example now my government pays private companies/publishers to produce learning materials which are then sold again to the schools - why are these materials paid for with public money aka taxes not freely available for everyone? I do agree private people should be able to monetise their work but this should never extend to materials that are paid for with taxes. Those should always be public goods. And I can see no other reason than greed and corruption why that is not the case. I am sure there are other reasons that I am missing since I’m not that deep in the field - but then again I just want everyone to be able to access the wealth of information easily that I (as someone fairly familiar with web technology) can access freely in multiple ways. As long as that is not the case I will stubbornly keep clamouring for copyright reform, happy to hear other ways to achieve that goal though.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  Looks like you have two ideal worlds: 1. One with all content free (the original comment) 2. One with “reasonable” monetization (this comment and current situation in the real world)