It's interesting how Elbakyan generally receives only praise in discussions like this. Do no supporters of capitalism want to denounce this self-styled communist and complain about the harm done to the profits of law-abiding businesses like Elsevier?
Law-abiding is by no means synonymous with good, or even neutral in a moral sense. Obligatory reposting of old HN content (especially under the section "Is Elsevier really so evil?"): "Why I still won’t review for or publish with Elsevier–and think you shouldn’t either" http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-r...
I'm also discovering that law-abiding is as much a reputation as a technicality. Companies get away with breaking the law all the time. They just aren't universally or publicly punished for it.
I'm not sure that morality would be an issue. The duty of companies in a capitalist system is simply to make money for their owners. If profit is maximised by selling fewer copies for higher fees, that's what they are supposed to do.
Very few of the misdeeds that Elsevier are accused of seem to be illegal. There's a claim that they publish copyright violations in some cases.
It seems like people are saying that there's some sort of capitalist code of conduct and Elsevier isn't living up to it, so it's not the fault of capitalism if the current situation sucks.
If you’re committed to ignoring substance in favor of rhetoric, you need to work on your rhetoric. A lot. I doubt that many here will be interested in shifty replies which fail to touch the substance of previous posts.
Even if that's what they're "supposed to do" (and I do agree to some extent that that holds for Elsevier), that doesn't make them a Good thing. Doesn't make them evil, either, but when any alternative is likely to be better, I won't shed a tear if they go away.
I would hope that supporters of capitalism aren’t deluded enough to believe that this system of cronyism and protectionism isn’t capitalism. Having called out the false premise underlying your challenge, they’d go about their lives.
The only protectionism that I can see is the copyright system itself, which is the essential element that makes scientific journal articles "capital" and subject to capitalism. Cronyism is just a normal part of business deal-making.
Not really, since the system has been set up with the journal articles designated as intellectual property, unauthorised access to that property is treated as theft, regardless who is doing it.
If articles weren't treated as capital, there'd be no place for capitalism as far as I can see. The articles would just be hosted on an archive.org / Wikimedia / arXiv - style website, and Sci-Hub already shows it can be done on a shoestring budget.
But that would be communism (I suppose) and I was asking if anyone was defending capitalism in this instance.
I think capitalism is often pernicious but I'm opposed to "stealing" to a fault. You could consider this theft (and the big journals obviously do). Whether that theft is justifiable or the moral equivalent of stealing more concrete stuff is up for debate.
I'd imagine there are a number of scholars who don't agree with their papers being used this way, so there's certainly another side to it.
I would never consider it theft, because I think the conversion of information into property and the criminalisation of copying is fundamentally misguided.
It does of course enable certain capitalist business models which involve controlling a scarce resource, even though in this case the scarcity is artificial and threatened by the likes of Sci-Hub.
"Information" is simply the name for products with 0 marginal cost. If marginal cost is 0.001$, is stealing it OK? $1? $100?
Marginal cost is not the same as average cost. If it's OK to steal something that has high fixed cost but 0 marginal cost, then surely it's OK to steal groceries, or houses, which have low fixed costs and high marginal costs, yes?
I don't consider it possible to steal information, because when I make my copy it doesn't deprive anybody else of their own copies. That would be the case even if I had a ridiculously expensive Internet connection and it cost me $1 to download it. Physical goods can't be copied in that way.
