Colombian Student Facing A Minimum Of Four Years In Prison For Uploading An Academic Article To Scribd
Found on Techdirt on Monday, 28 July 2014
Gomez did not try to profit from the paper. He also wasn't acting as some sort of indiscriminate distributor of infringing works. But under Colombian law, none of that matters.
Colombia gave the US copyright industry everything it wanted in order to secure this free trade agreement… and then it just kept going.
Just as in the US, plenty of useful information is locked up and inaccessible to anyone unable to afford the frequently exorbitant fees charged by various gatekeepers. Copyright's original intent -- "to promote the progress of science and the useful arts" -- isn't served by this behavior.
Easy solution: all academic research has to be made public and accessible for free. Copyright has to end where education begins.