Copywrong

Regular readers will know the Czar of Muscovy is a strong supporter of scientific advancement, and that the Czar strongly disapproves of the popular portrayal of conservatives as scientific morons; the Czar also believes that the GOP, in particular, should jump on the science and technology bandwagon as the advantages in doing so are very much in line with traditional GOP values.

In the previous link, just there above, Dear Reader can see evidence that anti-scientific idiocy is just as rampant on the liberal/Democratic side. But remember that the new Democratic America is “taking the ideology out of scientific issues.” Those of us who saw disturbing behavior from the Bush administration may now rejoice that hypocrisy is dead.

Except, as with a steady parade of recent news events, long live the hypocrisy. Witness our Democratic Congress, who are more than suggesting it is high time that scientific peer review (which ultimately is the hallmark of scientific advance) be curtailed under so-called reasons of copyright. What? Why?

Evidently, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) believes that scientists should not make their taxpayer-funded research freely available to the public for review; and that they should be forced to pay mainstream publishers...like the kind that donated money to him and the other bill sponsors...to publish these papers. Otherwise, scientists are just violating copyright law by giving their research away to anyone who wants to see or use it. And there oughta be a law agin’ it.

The Czar keeps re-reading the arguments here to see if there is some piece of logic he missed.

As Lessig rightly says, “And so rather than competing in the traditional way, they’ve [publishers] adopted the increasingly Washington way of competition—they’ve gone to Congress to get a law to ban the business model they don’t like.” To be fair, there are two Republicans involved with the bill, too, but the idea that any Democrat in the Age of O’nlightenment want to severely restrict the results of taxpayer-funded science in order to promote personal politics seems to conflict with Dear Leader’'s Most Important Goal of taking the politics out of scientific research.