…Rob Weir needs to go get his shinebox | Savage Minds

abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-24

Summary:

"I’ve always enjoyed reading Rob Weir’s columns in Inside Higher Education. He’s insightful, his advice is actually good (a rarity on the Internet) and he seemed to have a connection (somehow?) with anthropology. Although a lot of what he writes is for students or new faculty, I’ve benefitted from it. His latest column on Aaron Swartz, however, is a true disaster that indicates his profound naiveté about that last decade or so of thought that has occurred around scholarly publishing. In his article, Weir argues that downloading JSTOR articles is theft. Downloading and sharing articles, or movies, or books may have detrimental effects on the people who own and create those products, but it is demonstrably not theft. Theft of a physical object — for instance, a bank robbery — denies the former owner of that object the possession and enjoyment of the object. Copying articles does not. That is what makes digital objects like PDFs of journal articles so awesome. They enable sharing. This is obviously, transparently, not theft.  To see this simple fact, imagine we had a magical remote control. You pointed it at a physical object, pressed a button, and a perfect copy of that object was made. Now let’s imagine you went into a bank, made a copy of a twenty dollar bill and then left the bank with your copy of the twenty dollar bill and left the original with the bank. The original is still sitting there in the bank. Who in their right mind could call this theft? Certainly not the government, which charged Swartz with various forms of fraud, but not with theft. Because. He. Didn’t. Steal. Anything...  This is what has happened in the digital world. Publishers have tried to add DRM (digital rights management) to movies, mp3s, and books in order to create scarcity and non-duplicability in the digital world — in order, in other words, to remove the things most unique and important about the digital world in order to make it more like the analog world. They put their content behind paywalls for fear that if anyone got their hands on it, they would share it with others. And, above all, they spend a lot of time and money convincing suckers like Rob Weir that sharing is theft...  One result of this digital plenty is the development of a certain consumerist attitude which smacks of a vulgar sense of entitlement: who cares who makes this stuff? Who cares whether or not they can make a living? I just want to download my free stuff now. And if someone won’t let me — like because they are independent singer-songwriter — then they must be The Enemy.  Rob Weir is right to take issue with this sort of attitude, and to be bothered by the fact that it’s increasingly common amongst college students who are digital natives. But Aaron Swartz was a creator of technology, not just a consumer of it. And he was nothing if not principled. Just because some people want stuff for free doesn’t mean that all people who want to free stuff are bad.  Rob Weir then goes on to trot out the oldest, saddest argument in the book against open access: the only way to cover the costs of journal production is by charging fees for access. A lot of the time when people like Rob Weir say this they believe that they are the hard-nosed realists who are speaking truth to a bunch of naive activists. In fact, the opposite is true — it is inevitably those people who have thought least about scholarly publishing and know little about open access who make this claim. People like Rob Weir are not spoiling the party for all us activists, they are simply late to it..."

Link:

http://savageminds.org/2013/01/22/rob-weir-needs-to-go-get-his-shinebox/

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.business_models oa.publishers oa.licensing oa.comment oa.anthropology oa.aaa oa.copyright oa.attitudes oa.costs oa.debates oa.drm oa.societies oa.libre oa.ssh oa.ssh

Date tagged:

01/24/2013, 13:26

Date published:

01/24/2013, 08:26