Activists rally to save Internet Archive as lawsuit threatens site
Remember (the few that are over ~~600 years old might??:) )
Gutenberg invented movable type and a publication explosion followed. Heretofore books were hand copied, with errors etc. A medieval ~Xerox room was full of scribes - hard at work. A Xerox salesman who promised to double the speed of your copying - he walked in a hulking slave with a whip - all the monks visibly and hurriedly sped up.
Back to Gutenberg, <a href="https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.livescience.com/2569-gutenberg-changed-world.htm...</a> the Authors fought printing presses, they fought even lending libraries. Books were often chained to the shelves to limit access as well as theft.
<a href="https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-chained-libraries.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.amusingplanet.com/2015/04/the-last-surviving-cha...</a><p>So here we are now. Progress is hampered by the old farts, the author's guilds, the Enslaviers,(intentional typo on Elsevier) who want us to be in permanent economic thralldom to them. They are mere pebbls in the rivers of progress, so we pay them to go away, or break them up.
MIT has the right idea. I wish the Nobel Committee would announce that they will only consider openly published knowledge for future prizes. I wish all governmental other funders of research would mandate open publication. I wish all past published work was declared open NOW!!