Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/36

 socially useful work. As Stallman notes from a 1932 Supreme Court case in the United States:

The sole interest of the United States and the primary object in conferring the monopoly lie in the general beneﬁts derived by the public from the labors of authors. 41

While authors generally think of copyright as protecting their intellectual property, Stallman disputes such a stance.42 This is not, he would argue, the original goal of legislation, which instead posits copyright as ‘a balance between a public goal and market forces’ in which ‘the government spends our freedom instead of our money’. For Stallman, ‘[f]reedom is more important than money’43 and so there is, in his reading of the history of copyright, the impetus for the state to get the best bargain for the public and not for the individual creator.

This is where the lowering of permission barriers under open access begins to intersect with a history of copyright, technology and economics. In Stallman’s reading, the goal of the compromise of copyright is to give authors a limited time-period in which to sell their works to support themselves ﬁnancially. Academics, however, are not generally understood to be economically dependent upon selling their research output (I will revisit this logic in more detail in Chapter 2). The question that arises for the Open Access movement from this, taking Stallman as a starting point, is: why should academics retain the economic protections of copyright if they are not dependent upon the system of remuneration that this is supposed to uphold?44 As is clear, this mirrors the arguments for free access that I explored above: if authors are not required to sell their work, why can’t they give it away? In parallel: if authors are not required to sell their work, why do they require all of the protections of copyright and speciﬁcally those protections that exist for ﬁnancial beneﬁt? Stallman’s reading of the history of copyright is not ubiquitously held and it is not the sole reason why advocates argue for (and sceptics argue against) the lowering of permission barriers to scholarly research, but it does form one cornerstone in the movement’s history.

While it is wholly possible to dispute the health of the subscription-/sales-based economic model – and it certainly