Topic: Education and the free dissemination of ideas vs. copyrights

[Rai]

Here's an interesting article from Al Jazeera about library.nu, a huge and completely illegal online repository of books that was an essential tool for students and scholars in poor and less rich areas of the world.

So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? One thing it means is that these barbarians - these pirates who are also scholars - are angry. We scholars have long been singing the praises of education, learning, mutual aid and the virtues of getting a good degree. We scholars have been telling the world of desperate learners to do just what they are doing, if not in so many terms.

So there are a lot of angry young middle-class learners in the world this month. Some are existentially angry about the injustice of this system, some are pragmatically angry they must now spend $100 - if they even have that much - on a textbook instead of on themselves or their friends.

All of them are angry that what looked to everyone like the new horizon of learning - and the promise of the vaunted new digital economy - has just disappeared behind the dark eclipse of a Munich judge's cease and desist order.

Writers and scholars in Europe and the US are complicit in the shutdown. The publishing companies are protecting themselves and their profits, but they do so with the assent, if not the active support, of those who still depend on them. They are protecting us - we scholars - or so they say. These barbarians - these desperate learners - are stealing our property and should be made to pay for it.

I used this site a lot for scholarly purposes, to get books I could not find at the library of my university and ones that I couldn't have bought due to their horrid price tag. And I wasn't alone. The site was illegal, there's no doubt about that, but it existed as a symptom of a crisis in the free dissemination of information that exists even in scholarly circles due to the present-day attitudes towards copyright.

Fascinating stuff.

[Shadow Of A Doubt]

Another glaring example of why copyright law is just messed up. The profits of a few publishing companies are more important than the access to knowledge of millions. To earn money first get an education. To get an education spend lots of money. Hallelujah!

[Vincegamer]

It's not profits for "big publishing" that is the ground of copyright, but compensation to the creator for all the work and genius that went into writing the book.
If you have a better way to reward the author than granting him a monopoly on the distribution of his work let me know.