*shakes fist at academic paywalls*

[bunn]

How many people really want to read this article I desire about crime in Roman Egypt, published 1963 - and are able to do so?  I'm guessing maybe 6, but I think that might even be an overestimate.  And there isn't even a way to pay an exorbitant fee and get access to the bloody thing!   I know it is there, but it might as well be sealed inside a capsule on the bloody Moon.

I was reading a 'success story' article today about someone using Google Adsense to successfully monetise content, and it occurs to me that rather than stick all these bloody paywalls everywhere and make it next to impossible to get through the sodding things, it might be a better thing for everyone involved if they just bunged them up - past a certain date in the past maybe - as freeware on cheap hosting, and ran a really good properly structured set of ad campaigns against them.

Is it over-suspicious to suspect that universities wouldn't like this as it might mean people actually learning stuff and drawing conclusions without their expensive mediation...?  Or is is just OMG, advertising!  That's like... TRADE!  OH THE HORROR!!!  We'll be knighting the grandchildren of mill-owners next and then where will we be?

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I am wondering then, exactly who it is that decided copyright law and publishing should work in quite this way, and why their views are rated so highly!

I am particularly annoyed by the 'physical presence' requirement - if I went to Oxford and sat in a library, I am told I can have passwords that would let me through paywalls. But I cannot have these for remote access, even if I pay for it, and even though the process of sitting in front of a machine reading would be exactly the same. I am really doubting there is a law that says this is how it is supposed to be in so many words. Someone, somewhere, must be doing some interpreting of pre-internet law.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

My impression is that publishers, the music industry etc successfully lobbied to have draconian international laws re copyright - so that you can't put someone's book on the internet until SEVENTY-FIVE YEARS after they DIED!!!! which seems stupid to me. But given that it is the law, universities etc have to take it seriously, and can't copy someone's 1983 PhD thesis, even if the poor student in question, if he could be tracked down, would doubtless be delighted that someone somewhere is finally interested in reading his thesis.

I agree we need to smash all this. No idea how though.

Neuromancer

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Here, the publishers are benefiting from laws which (in terms of copyright extension) were intended to benefit authors' heirs. Trends in the late nineteenth century led publishers to stop buying copyrights outright from authors and instead start offering them advances and royalties, thereby sharing the risks. The extension of the copyright period to seventy-five years in the academic journal sector, of course, is of little benefit to the authors who weren't paid in the first place.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I'd still like to know how and where and when this was extended to restrict virtual borrowing. Neuromancer's comment above seems to suggest that copyright law restricts digitisation for library use: OK, understand that but clearly that's not the whole story, because digitised copies of a great deal of stuff exist on servers that are technically part of the wider internet, to which access is artificially restricted.

Did I miss the introduction of a paywall law, or is this caselaw?

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I've no idea, for as far as I know there is no restriction on digitisation for library use of theses, as long as the consent of the author is secured. I have signed a form myself, and Oxford are certainly keen on making research undertaken as part of higher degree work freely available.