I abide with the spirit of Aaron Swartz, but he wasn't perfect. I believe, philosophically, that knowledge should be the heritage of mankind, but practically there must be protective mechanisms to ensure that the knowledge is vouchsafed.
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves.
This is where he's wrongheaded. People do tend to keep power to themselves, but they don't tend to keep knowledge to themselves unless they, themselves, made it. What people are doing holding *access* to knowledge (generally through subscriptions) is trying to monetize knowledge, which is not the same struggle of power.
The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
Probably not. Much of the best science was published centuries ago and is available freely with just a little effort to go to the library. There is hardly any real knowledge that is kept from mankind, except business or national politics.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it.
This is where the internet hasn't quite solved the problem with replacing publishers. In truth, the problem is solved by myself and others who have developed voting models to create a meritocracy of information publishing, but it is not widely applied.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues?
This is generally handled by the administration of their university. There is no cost to academics. I don't want to ridicule Aaron in any way. I think RSS is an awesome contribution to the internet. But despite every liberty-loving individual`s desire for freedom, I've had to acknowledge that the power to create the personal computer (which has fostered access to all of this knowledge) came from individuals seeking to profit for themselves. It required corporations, law, money, and self-interest. I hardly believe I'm saying it, but the only conclusion is: Self-interest isn't necessarily bad. Marxos