"Speaking as a person who is employed by Elsevier (on the product side, not the journals side, and not speaking for Elsevier as a whole), I think I'm just trying to get a product out that solves a problem for researchers. I think many of us see rights restrictions as a hindrance to product development. Having to have a rights management system built into everything causes us to incur a development cost and makes it harder to prototype and test new ideas. However, the current business model is what fuels our development, so what it comes down to is that the company does some good, but also does some things that probably wouldn't be good if we were to reinvent the scholarly publishing system from the ground up, post-Internet. Each person has to answer the question about what they think is morally acceptable for themselves, but most people who engage in a grown-up form of moral reasoning can get beyond a dualistic moral stance and accept that like most things in life, there's some good..." - Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn, I do not think that using "grown-up" in your argumentation is very helpful. Regarding the less good things of Elsevier, is despite their huge profits they refuse to invest in anger in new technologies, new paradigms. That is, it indeed fuels development, but just a small bit, and most goes as profit to the owners. If you really want to play the moral reasoning side of this, please split out all the various aspects first which people may agree or disagree with... settling for "some good" is not a moral argument. - Egon Willighagen