If someone wants to do private research and sell the results to people via journals, then they should be free to do so.
That's not what this article is talking about though. This article is attempting to conflate the right to knowledge with a right to access publications that another party produced and put behind a pay wall.
Which is also different than the 3rd discussion of "if it is tax funded, shouldn't it be available to the general public?".
Thank you for clarifying this. I could see how a reasonable person could easily assume that Elbakyan is in fact talking about the prohibition of dropping rocks without going through an elaborate bit of mental gymnastics for a pedantic language gotcha in order to arrive at such an interpretation.
You should note that many authorities and governments in the past have absolutely punished the gathering of scientific knowledge, e.g. in a theology.
This is a good point. A person can mention freedom of speech and another person can respond in intentional misunderstanding in order to make a joke or to seem intelligent.
Like for example, someone can see an article written by the creator of Sci-Hub on a very specific topic and bring up rocks.
That indeed is the “specific topic” isn’t it?
So I would not focus on the edge cases.
Private corporations even pay for open access because the addressable market for such a product in dollars will be a pittance compared to whatever it cost them to research the product.
Regardless, LLM training has a different notion about the public domain, so trade secrets are what you're looking for - licensing isn't going to stop anyone.