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I think the professor himself is fed up with the situation, because as a researcher he is forced to publish his articles to for-profit publishers, who are basically the mafia gatekeepers, who profit from information that should be open to everyone. And the university profits from this lucrative business.
This Youtube video will open your eyes to this business: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKiBlGDfRU8
As a researcher, I am very happy that recently all the conferences and journals we usually publish to champion open access publishing. Due to this, all my work is currently FOSS and all the papers open access. That is a great change to the papers of the past where you have to have an affiliation to a university to get access to a paper and sometimes even that is not enough.
That is a great change to the papers of the past where you have to have an affiliation to a university to get access to a paper and sometimes even that is not enough.
'Oxford Scholarship Online' would license different sets of books to different departments; so someone from the philosophy department couldn't get access to books classified under sociology or history.
Imagine doing something similar at the checkout table in a 'physical' library.
Here's another video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo (including an interview with the great Alexandra Elbakyan).
Cory Doctorow recently wrote about this in some detail (incl. helpful links): https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier
The ghost of Aaron Swartz, is that you?
Professor with tenure.
If I was a lecturer/professor, I'd totally do that.
But also, don't forget to use adblock!
extremely based professor
Libgen had a 502 error a couple days ago. Glad to see them back.
Anyway completely opposite as one of my teachers. I had to buy my teachers book for his course. The book he gave us was a binder with photocopied pages... Wtf?...
You own the fucking copyright. Give it to us for free.
Printing and binding is expensive, not to mention a waste of paper, you can't really expect them to front that cost IMO. He should have just given you the PDF instead printing it.
That's what I meant for giving it to us for free.
Also he got free photocopies from the school. That comes from tuition too.
That's what I meant for giving it to us for free.
Fair enough, that wasn't clear to me at least.
It truly baffles me how teachers could morally justify that. I would immediately think "Wait, if I make my students buy my textbook for the unit, I'm just fleecing them and they have no choice in the matter." and you would naively hope that anyone else would also feel the same way.
But how else is he going to pay for his yacht.... I mean, pay to feed his children.... Yeah, that's relatable with millennials and zoomers that are so far in debt and earning so little that they can't afford kids, right?
The greatest trick capitalists ever pulled is convincing creative individuals that copyright and patents exist to serve and protect their interests.
True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.
The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.
Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won't have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.
Piracy has always been a distribution issue. There are definitely greedy lazy people who will always want more for less, but the organized effort required for piracy only happens when fair access is impossible.
I think the problem is allowing corporations to own the copyright. We should make it so that only the original creator of something can copyright it for ten years.
I’d go one further and remove a corporation’s status of personhood.
An immortal, amoral, artificial entity should never have been granted parity status with people in our society.
@Flatworm7591 I heard about libgen and sci-hub from my uni professors. Before that, I never knew anything about them.
my hero 😎
£5*
Remember you absolutely must not go to these specific sites.
Do not do it.
See you all tomorrow for class.