HowNet plays the role of an online porter of documents and materials. To achieve the most comprehensive literature, it is necessary to negotiate with various academic journals and universities to obtain the right to publish literature in the form of paying copyright fees, which will generate a lot of transaction costs.
The logic that HowNet should be free is actually taking it for granted that lunch is free. It should be pointed out that HowNet was founded by Tsinghua University and Tsinghua Tongfang on 1999, and its parent company is an A-share listed company. Although it is supported by the education department and the science and technology department, it is not a government financial project, and it may be meaningless to ask an enterprise to provide free lunch for the whole society.
Extended data
When enjoying the rich database of HowNet, the payment based on downloading papers is partly to pay the transaction cost of HowNet as an intermediary in the process of platform construction, and the other part is to pay academic journals or authors. College students can use it for free, precisely because the school has paid the fee.
With the improvement of copyright awareness, many journals will make it clear that the articles will be uploaded to China Knowledge Network when accepting the contributions, and the resulting copyright increment will be distributed to the authors together with the remuneration.
Of course, this standardization is partial after all, and the creators are relatively in a weak position. The authorization behind HowNet is not standardized, and the problem of uneven income distribution exists in a large area. In 2008, 78 masters and doctors jointly sued HowNet for infringing the copyright of dissertations, and the case of 2 1 was supported by the court.
But even so, the criticism of HowNet should not slide to free lunch and piracy. With the strengthening of intellectual property protection, payment should be a normal behavior.
People's Network-HowNet monopoly is wrong, but free lunch is unreasonable.