Each time this subject comes up I feel moved to repost this article
[1]. The welfare of humanity, our species, no longer aligns with the
"publishing industry". Brutal, radical reform is now necessary.
> Then came the Covid pandemic and “climate emergency”. What had been a friendly, ideological tussle about the digital rights of scientists versus profiteers took on a new tone. To call it “civil disobedience” would be to miss the point. Universities simply stopped playing the game – and the more progressive governments followed suit by deeming the enforcement of academic publishers’ copyright no longer in the public interest.
So, this didn't happen - and IIANM, there wasn't even a copyright/patent moratorium on vaccine-related IP, right? I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?
Companies like Moderna did dispense with IP restrictions around the vaccine, but it turns out that this was never a binding constraint in the first place. These vaccines must essentially be brewed via a biological process, not merely synthesized in a chemical lab like most pharmaceuticals. There's probably a whole lot of fuzzy know-how in this that's inherently hard to replicate, no matter what the legal environment is like.
I don’t think anything happened at a governmental level, but I know some companies open sourced select patents to help with the pandemic. I vaguely remember an issue with 3D printing ventilator parts because it violated the patent [1], but I don’t think that company ever actually sued anyone, they just threatened it.
Reminds me of very small integrated circuit process nodes where the manufacturing process itself is so rife with trade secrets and "art not science" that it's hard to duplicate even without IP restrictions.
> I seem to recall tussles over where poorer countries would be able to just manufacture copies of the Pfizer, Moderna or Astra-Zeneca vaccine locally, without permission from the IP holders. What ended up happening with that?
Bill Gates convinced them not to free up the IP. No joke.
Cheap duplication of written data, conveying knowledge from one brain to another without requiring tedious manual transcription or oral explanation to each learner, started with the printing press in the 1400s and broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education, bringing book learning and literacy out of scarcity to the masses.
Even into the mid-20th century, academic publishing was primarily on paper and relied on expensive offset printing that only makes economic sense when printing runs of many thousands of copies, requiring a publishing industry to produce these documents.
Now, though, that "digital publishing" is available, this problem of scarcity no longer exists. The publishing industry requires scarcity to make their contribution valuable, and they can only create that scarcity artificially.
https://archive.ph/EHird