I'm not sure exactly what your disagreement is here, so sorry if what follows just muddies the waters further.
Background: an academic must publish. It is their purpose. And they have relatively little control over the venue they publish in - whatever happened some time ago controls where they can have impact and gain kudos (and reach).
I think the practices of publishers are immoral. A large system, including laws, the state, and various independent and dependent entities makes what they do legal, and disobeying their rules illegal. I was not forced to publish with Elsevier, but as mentioned above, neither did I have any realistic other options. Vested interests are real, however much we would like to wish them away.
To use an analogy: if bus companies were privately owned, and practiced segregation (and sitting in the wrong place could be construed as criminal), would it be civil disobedience to sit in the wrong place? After all, nobody is forcing you to ride a particular bus. You could get together with other like-minded people and form a new bus company. However, that is a serious undertaking; we could just make segregation illegal instead.
In the same way, we could form lots of new journals and conferences which would struggle to prominence; or we could make copyright assignment of academic work illegal, at least for publicly funded research. Don't forget that copyright is at the gift of the state; it is not a natural right but a constructed one; and without the state enforcing it would be significantly weaker.
Summary: Some acts are so immoral that the state makes them illegal, even between consenting entities. In my opinion, what one might call copyright theft, as practised by publishers upon academics, is one of those acts; yet currently the law says I am the one in the wrong. Hence, civil disobedience: active and professed refusal to follow a particular law because, like a bus, I have very little choice about which one to get on (to publish in), but I'll sit (put my paper) where I like once I'm on it.
Background: an academic must publish. It is their purpose. And they have relatively little control over the venue they publish in - whatever happened some time ago controls where they can have impact and gain kudos (and reach).
I think the practices of publishers are immoral. A large system, including laws, the state, and various independent and dependent entities makes what they do legal, and disobeying their rules illegal. I was not forced to publish with Elsevier, but as mentioned above, neither did I have any realistic other options. Vested interests are real, however much we would like to wish them away.
To use an analogy: if bus companies were privately owned, and practiced segregation (and sitting in the wrong place could be construed as criminal), would it be civil disobedience to sit in the wrong place? After all, nobody is forcing you to ride a particular bus. You could get together with other like-minded people and form a new bus company. However, that is a serious undertaking; we could just make segregation illegal instead.
In the same way, we could form lots of new journals and conferences which would struggle to prominence; or we could make copyright assignment of academic work illegal, at least for publicly funded research. Don't forget that copyright is at the gift of the state; it is not a natural right but a constructed one; and without the state enforcing it would be significantly weaker.
Summary: Some acts are so immoral that the state makes them illegal, even between consenting entities. In my opinion, what one might call copyright theft, as practised by publishers upon academics, is one of those acts; yet currently the law says I am the one in the wrong. Hence, civil disobedience: active and professed refusal to follow a particular law because, like a bus, I have very little choice about which one to get on (to publish in), but I'll sit (put my paper) where I like once I'm on it.