I think the argument is that the science building the underlying infrastructure is public and free to share. And that is a fundamental part of the reason for it reaching the size/scale that it is right now.
The big publishers are public parasites that make money off the work of other people and through controlling information and progress. The quicker they go into the dustbin of history the better. My issue is less with the argument and more with the general sentiment.
I don't understand how we can get outraged that companies like Elsevier operate this way when it is fundamentally the same closed model that is so prevalent in tech. I don't imagine as an industry we are so self-unaware, contradictory, or (to use a less nice word) hypocritical, but the sentiment doesn't match with the actions of this industry. where does the disconnect come from?
We celebrate piracy in this thread, but if these same tactics were turned on almost any company represented on HN, it would not be seen as a virtue.
They're totally different. If tech were like academic publishing, software would be developed in publicly-subsidized studios and then given, for free, to for-profit distributors. These distributors would play no significant part in the development of the software, but would happily charge the public an arm and a leg for any usage of it.
Or you implement IETF RfCs. There's an FTP server with all standards documents. If you have just email but no Internet yet (think uucp mail or bbs), there's a service where you can request documents to be sent to you.
"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."
Brand wasn't a naive utopian; he acutely understood the conflicts that the internet would bring about.