One of the most unpleasant aspects of my day job is running constantly into the copyright fundamentalism of the print media. Over and over again, I find journals are unavailable, books are locked down, and articles are sequestered by idiotic copyright restrictions. The economic downturn has made things even worse, because publishers are frantically locking down everything they can get their tentacles on, in the vain hope this will somehow resuscitate their broken business models. All it ever does is restrict access to texts to super-rich neoliberal elites, which is precisely what those elites want, of course.
Other commercial interests are now trying to turn text-distribution into yet another corporate pigopoly. Their dream is to do to print what cellphone companies have done with text-messaging: technically speaking, it costs carriers almost nothing to send text-messages, but they routinely charge you 10 cents per message. There's no law to stop them, and US telcos routinely buy off Congress through hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign donations and lobbying.
Fortunately, the data requirements for storing text are far lower than music or video, so time -- a polite way of saying, the ever-evolving digital commons, plus the urgent need of the BRIC nations for English-language materials which are affordable to citizens with per capita incomes of less than $1000 per year -- is on our side.
Texts want to be free, just like information.
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