The founder of the Creative Commons license committed suicide after being threatened with 95 years in prison over a copyright violation. The article goes through some of the arguments against standard copyright.

‘Open access’ is an anodyne term for a profoundly transformative idea. Advocates argue that academic research should be made freely available to the world at the time of publication, and that access should not be contingent on an individual’s or institution’s ability to afford a subscription to a given journal or database. Academic authors do not usually write for profit; rather, their work aims to augment the common store of knowledge. What’s more, since the government often funds their research, it’s not a stretch to claim that the fruits of that research should belong to the public. So why should this material be subject to the same access restrictions as a mystery bestseller or a Hollywood film? As with many other inexplicable policies, the blame belongs to a vestigial middleman.

When a university professor finishes a research project, she typically records her results in an academic paper, which she submits for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. These journals—the reputable ones, at least—operate via volunteers, with authors, editors, and peer reviewers all working for free. Nobody gets paid, or expects to get paid, except the publisher. In exchange for the publisher’s services, which include coordinating the publication and peer-review processes, formatting, and distribution, the author concedes the copyright to her article in perpetuity. It’s a simple trade: the academic publisher assumes the financial risk of preparing and distributing an esoteric work for which there’s a limited audience and in exchange retains all the profits that might come from its sale.

In commercial trade publishing, publishers realise profit by selling a book for a relatively low price to a wide audience. Since no wide audience exists for academic papers, academic publishers realise profit by selling them at high prices to the few entities who can’t do without them—libraries and scholars, mostly—which renders these papers functionally inaccessible to the casual or impoverished user.