This is amusing but also frightening. Our public institutions are being blackmailed into paying huge fees to an organization which is aggressively promoting a wrong understanding of ethics and the law mainly for the benefit of institutions which have no qualms about stealing ideas and property which are either public domain or owned by others.
I got it via Stephen Downes who also notes Clarence Fisher’s observations on the duplicity of publishers’ claims about copyright.
Public rights defender Michael Geist also refers to this among other aspects of the issue – including the fact that political contributions from those we pay for this “service” are being accepted as political contributions by those entrusted with determining public policy.