pull down to refresh
121 sats \ 4 replies \ @SwearyDoctor 27 Dec \ on: Value-for-value is the way: NO MORE COPYRIGHT meta
excellent, yes.
What's missing is that copyright is also theft and extortion.
I wrote a number of books, around 15 or so, as part of being an academic. The academic publishing houses retain the copyright to earn off of these works, not me.
They make contracts that often times CHARGE authors for printing their work, never paying them anything; this happens to young scholars. With time, I got "nothing for the first 400 sold copies, 10 cents per copy afterwards" contracts - still nothing, academic works don't sell a million copies. I made maybe 50 a year with that, if that. The publisher bagged all the income.
They can do this because a) they know academics need to publish to get their careers off the ground, b) universities pay them (badly), so no need to live off of book income c) the academic world, inexplicably, equates known publishing houses with status and truth-value. Yes, you can obviously self-publish; but that comes with a shadow cast on it. What, the publishers didn't want you? (In fact, it means you got to circumvent the content control publishers impose, which is one of many processes that make academia so obedient).
It's similar in other industries, where the creative parts aren't actually the people that profit off of copyright; it's corporations gobbling up the rights to in turn "make you visible", "give you access" and, in turn, exercise control your content.
Kill copyright.
Makes me really sad every time I hear this kind of cases, particularly academics. I tried to publish in universities (made one) but then I realized I'm going to accomplish my goals better writing in blogs rather than papers because I have friends that I know they write >100 papers and they see no revenue from that.
reply
oh no, papers are 0 revenue. Papers, you do dark magic rituals and sell your kidney just to get them accepted and printed. Academic journals rely on free labor from editors (no pay usually), authors (0 pay, always), reviewers (0 pay, sometimes a discount coupon from the publisher). And then they charge uni libraries literal thousands for subscriptions.
reply
Oh God, didn't know this one. Once again, this proves the leave the science to scientists is blatant bullshit.
reply
It is. This setup makes sure that there's little to no critical thinking in academia; the reviewers will stop it ("this is not the state of the science"), the editors will stop it (by giving it to reviewers they know will say what they want them to say), the publishers will reject it if it's too controversial.
If you write something that pisses on an established orthodoxy, the reviewers will tear you apart. If you write something that tries to combine two things, they'll give it to two reviewers from these different sides, and each will tear up the part of the other.
So academia encourages people to run with what they usually run with, and PhD candidates and students have to kiss up to these same professors, who ill control them in just the same way. Those are fiefdoms, quite literally, and success comes through fealty to the prince(s).
reply