I think it is reasonable to feel frustrated that there are few ways to (politely, respectfully, non-confrontationaly) express my dissatisfaction with the appointed representative for a system with which I have a complaint. It's a generic problem with modern organizations, simply due to their size and hierarchical structure. Telling me to go home and look up a specialized complaint line isn't very satisfying, as of course very few people are going to do it. Which means that most complaints never get heard, which is systemically counter-productive to getting things fixed. I'm left either feeling at the mercy of a system which obviously doesn't want to hear my concerns, or feeling like a jerk for burdening some random low-level worker. I think it's a general cause of friction in our society that we haven't found a better way to deal with this situation.
It may sound pretentious, but I think there is value to this kind of whinging. One, well, it's kind of fun, and this is just a silly blog in the end. But two, it helps me clarify and explore my own position, and hopefully further the dialog about what we're going to do about information access as a society. We are facing a point where a good chunk of a generation is treating copyright law as seriously as they do drug prohibition. That's a fairly serious situation and it didn't have to be this way.
(And no, the publisher only provides 1995 and past. And at the risk of pushing this conversation even farther afield, I feel very little desire to negotiate with people holding information -- particularly academic papers! -- hostage like that. They've made their position quite clear through their actions. Assuming they aren't already scanned, they could ask Google to scan the backlog and it would be done pretty damned quick. If they weren't so intent on maintaining their artificial and doomed monopoly, that is.)
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It may sound pretentious, but I think there is value to this kind of whinging. One, well, it's kind of fun, and this is just a silly blog in the end. But two, it helps me clarify and explore my own position, and hopefully further the dialog about what we're going to do about information access as a society. We are facing a point where a good chunk of a generation is treating copyright law as seriously as they do drug prohibition. That's a fairly serious situation and it didn't have to be this way.
(And no, the publisher only provides 1995 and past. And at the risk of pushing this conversation even farther afield, I feel very little desire to negotiate with people holding information -- particularly academic papers! -- hostage like that. They've made their position quite clear through their actions. Assuming they aren't already scanned, they could ask Google to scan the backlog and it would be done pretty damned quick. If they weren't so intent on maintaining their artificial and doomed monopoly, that is.)