Knowledge (and art) creation itself requires access. Which was what Aaron Swartz was hoping to achieve in compiling JSTOR's archive. He was effectively politically assassinated for this.
Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper:
Note that the copyright angle here is that:
[T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible.
That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes:
[S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way.
Cory Doctorow's explored that topic in various aspects, including the sheer naked power grab and risk-shift of publishers, e.g., the NY Times's "reasonable agreement" which resulted in Doctorow shelving a planned essay for the newspaper:
Note that the copyright angle here is that:
[T]he contract came in, and it included a clause that I never signed: I had to indemnify the publisher against all claims related to my work, including any that the publisher decided, unilaterally, to settle. This magazine, published all over the world, had exposure to legal systems I knew nothing about, as well as legal systems that I knew all too well to be grossly authoritarian and terrible.
That is, any copyright infringement risk is borne by the author rather than the publisher, which as Doctorow notes:
[S]ince I have very few assets and very little savings, I was literally financially incapable of indemnifying them. Signing that clause might ruin my life and drive me to bankruptcy, but it wouldn't actually protect them in any way.
<https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/27/reps-and-warranties/#i-ag...>
That's literally a chilling effect on new authorship.
There's also the fact that there is now a "copyright hole" of extant published works still under copyright which are simply not available, see:
<https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2019/iss4/6/>
I strongly recommend Nina Paley's "Copyright is Brain Damage" TEDxMaastrict talk:
<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=XO9FKQAxWZc>