Byrne gets the information-dissemination idea, though:
'But who then decides what data “deserves” to be stolen and “liberated”? '
He's arguing that the authors (academic researchers) should be the ones practicing disobedience. Lawfully allowing a third agent to later 'liberate' the material from its domain is a slippery slope. By that rational, personal correspondences, IPR, stealth-mode ML algo.s, and sexts are all fair game for liberation.
Information, of itself, is not beholden to be free. Information without context is noise. In academic publishing, the context includes -- I'm guessing -- authors' tenureships (the primary source of income and job security). In music publishing, the context is attribution, since without their oeuvre, a musician is just a busker.
"Lawfully allowing a third agent to later 'liberate' the material from its domain is a slippery slope"
Yet copyright law in the United States has always required an expiration date on copyrights. I say this with confidence because anything else would have violated our constitution:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
So in fact, the law as it exists today already allows a "third agent" to liberate material that was once copyrighted. Of course, unlike the original copyright act that allowed copyrights for 14 years, today's copyright laws do not allow work to enter the public domain for multiple generations: the lifetime of the author, and then decades after that. We are not on a "slippery slope" that will lead to violations of personal privacy; in fact, much like we now have technology that obviates the need for academic publishers, we also have technology to protect our personal correspondence from third parties (public key cryptography), and much like the law hampering our ability to actually use the technology that would spread knowledge better than academic publishers, the law thwarted the efforts to deploy public key cryptosystems.
'But who then decides what data “deserves” to be stolen and “liberated”? '
He's arguing that the authors (academic researchers) should be the ones practicing disobedience. Lawfully allowing a third agent to later 'liberate' the material from its domain is a slippery slope. By that rational, personal correspondences, IPR, stealth-mode ML algo.s, and sexts are all fair game for liberation.
Information, of itself, is not beholden to be free. Information without context is noise. In academic publishing, the context includes -- I'm guessing -- authors' tenureships (the primary source of income and job security). In music publishing, the context is attribution, since without their oeuvre, a musician is just a busker.