Fighting for Open Access - Open Enterprise

"As you may have noticed, this weekend the online world has been filled with news of and responses to the suicide of the young American activist Aaron Swartz. Many excellent personal tributes have been written about the man and his achievements, but here I want to concentrate on the just one aspect: the incident that led to his arrest and probably to his suicide too ...  As you can see, this touches on the old nonsense about people 'stealing' digital content. That's factually and legally incorrect, of course: you can't steal things by making copies of them: at most, it's copyright infringement. But the situation here is far worse. For the files that he was accused of copying were not mp3s, or the latest cinematic blockbuster; they were academic articles stored on MIT's computer network.  That is, they were writings whose main purpose is to pass on knowledge to others, so that they could learn from them and build on them before contributing their own work to the knowledge commons. Moreover, they were stored on the network of an institution whose central tasks are the creation and transmission of knowledge.  It is therefore absurd in the highest degree that Swartz was not only arrested for merely making copies (he didn't pass them on anywhere), but potentially faced several decades in prison for doing so. As many people have noted (and probably many more realised) this sums up why the current copyright system is not just dysfunctional, but fundamentally unjust: it actively stops people sharing knowledge through threats of this kind.  Worse, the truly disproportionate punishments that have been brought in recently have created a Kafkaesque situation where people can face many years in prison for sharing copies of digital files containing knowledge that has been created with the express purpose of being shared.  Swartz lived trying to free knowledge in various ways, as the tributes linked above detail. Unfortunately he also died trying to free knowledge thanks to the vindictive decision of the US authorities to make an example of him to scare the rest of us into acquiescing to the copyright industry's attempts to lock down knowledge.  There is an important opportunity this week to support the movement to make research more freely available, of which Swartz was a part: open access...  open access has gone from strength to strength, culminating in the UK government announcing in November that it would make available £10 million specifically to fund open access publication of research. [Update: Hadley Beeman has kindly added some more background to the latest UK government moves - please see the comment at the end of this post for some important links.]  So open access has won in the UK, you might think. And so did I, more or less, until this turned up last week:  'The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee will next week hold its first evidence session in a new short inquiry into the Government’s open access policy and its implementation by the Research Councils UK (RCUK) (the partnership of the UK’s seven research councils)...'  So what? you might think - surely just a sign that open access has arrived, and their Lord and Ladyships wish to acquaint themselves with it. Well, maybe, maybe not ..."