- This powerful little book is exceptionally well written and thoroughly researched. Lamdan is Professor of Law at the City University of New York and a former law librarian in law schools and law firms.
- She very clearly outlines the problems we have with the enormous power companies like Reed Elsevier LexisNexis (RELX) and Thomson Reuters have gained by turning information gathering into data manipulation and exploiting it for profit. RELX is one of the most profitable companies in the world, closely followed by Thomson Reuters. Their hold over critically important knowledge and information in our digital world is monopolistic and borders on abusive.
- They operate globally in key knowledge industries such as academic research, legal information, financial information, and news gathering. What should be public and made far more easily available has been totally privatised, locked away and paywalled with minimal exceptions. But importantly the raw data they access has been mined, retooled and bundled into information packages sold at high prices to universities, corporates, syndicates and government instrumentalities. Privacy is breached as a matter of course.
- So many paragraphs in the book are eminently quotable, so I'll restrict myself to a few to give you an idea of the expertise and passion Lamdan packs into this grenade of a book:
The centuries-old concept of a 'marketplace of ideas' was not meant to be a for-profit business. But RELX and Thomson Reuters run closed information universes where they curate informational resources and decide who can access them. Like Facebook and Amazon, RELX and Thomson Reuters have privatised, and now control, social spaces that used to be public. They are the information landlords that decide who can swim in the ocean of knowledge.
Elsevier's high-priced fees for publicly funded research are digital versions of classic, exploitative rent-seeking behaviours.
Publishers prevent digital lending with prohibitive licensing agreement terms...They even sue online lending repositories like the Internet Archive and people who try to 'free knowledge' by sharing articles online...Academia is being turned into a data industry.
Just as 'The problem with Facebook is Facebook' the problem with data companies is data companies - their business model is based on hoarding, paywalling, and crunching as much information and data as possible. Their very existence is based on data exploitation, surveillance, and informational inequality.
Changing the legal parameters of data analytics' companies' roles requires a large, orchestrated round of legal changes including copyright reform, reinvigorating antitrust doctrine, closing up constitutional law loopholes, and designating resources for government data infrastructure and access. That type of legal revolution isn't likely to happen any time soon.
- Major reforms are needed, including in Australia, to free this vital information for public access.
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