when a society finds itself sunk-cost-fallacying about why bright youngsters must be denied access to the sum of human knowledge is when it may be time to take a deep breath and pull the bandaid off (change funding incentives)
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RT @alicemazzy
libgen/scihub are of such monumental social/moral worth that their illegality delegitimizes the law as a whole
https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/1220062740825415689
@pee_zombie I have a hard time reasoning about this. It's quite similar to the google books situation where google has digital copies of all books in existence but cannot just allow people to access it due to copyright.
It would be great if everyone if everyone could have access to all these books/texts for free. But at the same time, these works have value and should command a certain price to compensate creators/publishers for the work and the monetary risk involved in producing this work.
@pee_zombie research might be a little different due to the funding structure. but the core idea against scihub holds some merit: if the work is valuable, the creators should be compensated somehow. Now, here it's just parsitic companies like Elsevier reaping profit so I/others dont feel bad about using scihub.
What is a compelling alternative model for scihub? I don't know but this equilibrium we're at does not seem like a stable one.
