'if we get above the din' otherwise known as ignoring the otherside's arguments.
So in the scientific community, what does a journal publisher do. First off they review the papers (peer review) that sent into them and if they are a respected journal the people doing the reviews aren't hacks and take the time and resources to properly review the papers given to them, then they only publish the papers deemed worthy (and even then some papers are questionable can get though, but you should see some of the crap they filter out), and for example the OMAE (one place where I've published papers) arranged an annual conference where we could present and answer questions etc about our paper and share and grow information with other attendees. If your a researcher this is worth something to you. I can assure you that Gita Gopinath publishes and attends lots of conferences (»
www.economics.harvard.ed ··· gopinath) so the while the internet is one source of her research its far from her only source, which invalidates the statement that everything she needs is on the internet and hence this CERN presentation, because its simply not true.
Again if I want information to be publicly available I can publish it on the internet, which still excludes some members of society who don't have a computer/internet or otherwise access to such, but for those that do, its freely available. However you don't have the benefit of peer review etc, so maybe its brilliant, maybe its utter crap, but you have take the time and effort to decide that for yourself.
Now as someone who has sat on PhD candidate reviews as a guest, I can tell you most of the world's research papers are read by a handful of people then promptly filed and forgotten. Really the last original idea was at least several hundreds of years ago and most ideas are mere derivatives of existing ideas, hence why you can't patent an idea and why I like copyright as it truly is a protection of an expression of an idea which doesn't limit the creativity of others as much as patents are now being used to do.
Even in the video the claim that copyright is a property right is agreed upon, so does that mean that a creator can sell that property to the publisher which is the common practise in the music industry as the artist really isn't interested in the business only in the art and if they had to do both, it would severely limit their artist time as it means they would have to manage the business side to put food on the table. What do you do for a living, as you likely specialize in some task as to optimize your profitable output, sounds like a artist/publisher arrangement doesn't it.
I have published papers in journals (they were granted permission to print the paper), and I have papers which weren't submitted to journals for publication (if they were to appear in a journal then we would sue them on copyright infringement as they have no right to publish them). None of my research has been publicly funded, so that argument doesn't hold water at all. Even in the case of Universities, what does the public fund exactly?
We built this world? Really what was his contribution? Typically everything in this world that has been built, has been built by a surprisingly few people. The internet, World Wide Web, how many designers at Boeing? I think some people are confused that if they fly on a plane that means they must be involved in building it. They might be interested, but their contribution to building it is zero. Dam few people in this world are responsible for everything which affects them, and we typically look at those people as having something wrong with them (that dude living off the land in some remote location).
I find it interesting that CERN is presenting this video given Tim invented the WWW as a way to share papers with other academics who had access to the net at the time, or would have access to the net. Internet works great and you can put up a blog and publish your brains out and even make it free and academics know that (they search blogs etc to), but they also subscribe to journals and attend conferences because the internet isn't enough and I'm not just saying that the material on the internet is lacking, I'm also saying it lack the ability to share information at the level researchers need. The internet hasn't been able to replace face to face meetings and live discussion of ideas etc and perhaps never will.
So for example lets consider his search for information about Jaundice. Hmmm $435 to access this information, what internet did he search and why? Googling Jaundice returns millions of hits, so why use his costly academic search system? Could it be that he knows that the articles will have been though peer review etc and hence will save him time from surfing through tons of crap articles or articles which aren't really related to his topic? It must have some value to him, other wise he would have just gone to Google, but he didn't.
Blake