Copyright Week: Open Access As The Antidote To Privatizing Knowledge And Learning | Techdirt

" ... Yes, the idea was to provide a limited monopoly to incentivize the initial creation, and the exchange was that it would then be given into the public domain soon after, such that everyone could learn from it. Yesterday, we covered the importance of the public domain, and today's topic for Copyright Week goes hand in hand with it: the idea of open access. Copyright law was supposed to encourage greater access to knowledge to have a better educated populace. But the current setup of the law appears to do the exact opposite of that much of the time. When it comes to newly discovered knowledge, our copyright law (and the way it's used by some giant companies) seems almost entirely focused on making knowledge more expensive and less open thereby massively hindering the ability to share knowledge and better educate the public. This has been seen most recently in the publishing giant Reed Elsevier's effective war on access to knowledge, using copyright law as a sort of weapon to block researchers from sharing their own research. However, as we've discussed for many years, the whole system is rigged against knowledge access and sharing, and in favor of giant publishers locking up knowledge -- often including research that was funded almost entirely by your tax dollars. Here's how the privitization of knowledge works, thanks to copyright ..."