Large educational publishers and many in academia have recently shown how scared they can be of the transformative powers of “Open Data”- type thinking and the web in general. Coming from a bias that education and the educational mission is helped by maximizing “open”ness, I will look at some recent examples of copyright and patent enforcements and the concerns about piracy, lowered standards, etc. to see what the publishers, academia and others have been doing to protect their interests and whether these actions complement or contradict the educational mission.