RE: The War on Open Science: Scientific Journals and the Research Racket
I agree with the general idea of your article. I have a different take on the matter though.
-1- Aaron Swartz stole. Really. He stole and there is no way to robinhood-justify this
-2- Academia is rotten to the core. It works much like kingship. One has to die in order for someone else to fill the position. There is a monopoly to knowledge. It's much like upvoting in here. You upvote the old whale in order to get more rewards. quality doesn't matter. this is idiotic.
-3- Most research is downright bullshit and even they themselves admit it. Nobody cares about quality anymore (and doing actual science) but rather care about the publishing number and measuring dick size. Really, number of publications matter more than quality of research. Ask any academic.
-4- Most research is not even research. Rarely a scientific research can be falsifiable and replicable.
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124
-5- Fuck academia. Fuck the public funding. Fuck the relic professors that have created a circle jerk. Nobody can spoil open source projects. If more people join the movement then let it be.
-6- Universities are as expired as churches. Knowledge can be found for free, online. Anyone can contact a research and if it works then it can be monetised. If its not, no amount of peer review is going to make it stick. this is the biggest difference of the real world vs the safe-space academic world.
Stealing something by copying it? Is that like taking a photo with no flash of the monalisa, with a 50MP camera on a tripod? Did the original disappear? I am tired of hearing this horseshit that copying (with attribution) is theft. It is patently not. And a patent is another example of a theft, because, and oddly enough, historically (like how secret shares was devised by two mathematicians at the same time) it is rare a new idea is given by the maker, to only one. Sure, register a trademark. Claim first dibs on some specific original idea, in it's whole entirety. But who benefits from creating this atmosphere of fear around creative work?
It is an absolute crime that anything paid for by the crime of extortion, i mean by taxes, is not already public domain, and even the download is funded (what, $0.00001 per copy, right?).
I look forward to the day when people realise what an abject racket is copyright, and it's just one of the many branches of the Mafia, ahem, did I say mafia? No, I meant Government.
Controversial views as always. Thanks for commenting:)