Do We Really Need Copyright For Academic Publishing? | Techdirt

"Perhaps copyright protects the wrong thing for academics: what they really care about is credit for the ideas their papers contain, not how they phrased them. This analysis echoes suggestions I've heard elsewhere that one approach to reforming copyright would be to abolish it completely for academic publishing. Not only do scholars not need copyright for their work, if it's ideas not expression that counts, it gets in the way by putting obstacles between them and the research of others. Moreover, as the QuestionCopyright article points out, fully opening up research would also be the best way of tackling what seems to be the chief fear of academic authors: plagiarism. More readers able to access more works would mean a greater likelihood that unacknowledged copying between them would be noticed and exposed...."