(Intellectual) Property is Theft! » Cyborgology

" ... Lately, I’ve been taking advantage of my institution’s (appropriately ancient-sounding) ILLiad Inter-Library Loan System. Usually, if I can’t find journal article I need, I just ask a fellow grad student friend over GChat or Facebook to get me the article from their library. If I can’t find anyone (or I’ve asked them too many times) I resort to ILLiad. Getting a book from ILLiad means waiting about 24 hours for an undergrad on work study to copy and paste a DOI and send me the article under another institution’s journal subscription. It is the ultimate exercise in artificial scarcity ... The article in question here is Janet Moore’s “Living in the Basement of the Ivory Tower: A Graduate Student’s Perspective of Participatory Action Research Within Academic Institutions” published in 2004 in Educational Action Research. The journal is owned by Taylor & Francis. The article focuses “on the ways in which universities are adapting to the presence of alternative research methodologies.” Moore is mainly interested in Participatory Action Research or PAR- a deeply collaborative research method wherein academics collaborate with community members on every aspect of the research design ... I woke up Monday morning to an email notification saying that the library gnomes (work study students eating burritos) had retrieved my article. I download it, put it in my Zotero library and open it in iAnnotate PDF. Then I get this sad little error message: 'This PDF is protected against adding annotations.  Therefore all annotation operations are disabled.'  The high levels of Morissetteian irony might have obscured the full picture, so let me restate it, in full, right here: My article about radical democratic knowledge-making had been DRM’ed by a university’s library. I don’t know why this one article was protected (none of the others had been) but it seems like a pretty safe assumption that it had something to do with concerns over 'intellectual' property ..."