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The New York Times tried to block the Internet Archive: another reason to value the latter
(walledculture.org)
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2023
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Hot take: We need a middle ground between free unfettered access to journalism and total pay wall restrictions. Physical libraries do this well. Digital content is a lot more complicated. Maybe Internet Archive should only be able to publish content that’s over X years old? Thoughts?
There has been a long fight to get academic papers whose funding sources came from the government to be made open access, with the justification that the people who literally paid for the research should be able to read it. We’re not talking national security here - we’re talking about fruit flies and black holes and such.
The last time I checked, they agreed to make all government funded research open access after (I think) one year. I still think that’s ludicrous, but o see that as being analogous to what is being proposed here.
If we were to check the average number of times the average news article is accessed after publication, I bet it would fall off a cliff after the first couple of days at most. Some might have more staying power, but I bet 90-95% of them basically never get touched again. I’m sure you could take the number of people who buy a subscription on the basis of needing to read a three month old article and figure out a different way to make back the $100/month or whatever they’d lose on just opening access.
And that’s why I’m not pretending I have the solution. Details have to be sorted out.