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I still think of the academic publishing industry as worse than the music industry in terms of the money going to people other than those who actually create the works being consumed, and the music industry is pretty bad in this regard: only a small percentage of the cost of a record/CD/MP3 purchased legally goes to actual musicians or songwriters, with most going to management and marketing types. These industries all have in common archaic business models built up in the days when bulky physical objects had to be manufactured and distributed, necessitating all sorts of expensive infrastructure that isn't needed nowadays for electronic distribution. It's notably primarily people connected with this management/marketing/corporate end who are shouting the loudest for draconian protection of intellectual property, supposedly for the sake of the poor starving artists, though they sometimes take such positions over the objection of artists themselves.
The still-useful role of gatekeepers to filter information and distinguish a crank's blog and a garage band's noise from the "good stuff" (however this may be defined) needs to somehow be recreated in the modern world; exactly what form this will take is yet to be determined, but hopefully it won't sap up nearly as much of the resources that go into the industry compared to the writers/artists/performers/researchers themselves.
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Gerard takes on JSTOR, purt'near calls them liars
