[TOS] Copyright assignment considered harmful?

[Mel Chua]

(The subject line is an allusion to 
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html.)

As some of you know, I started grad school this week. And... culture 
shock. Ohhhh boy, culture shock. (Yes, I know every professor who's had 
me for POSSE is now chortling with we-told-you-so glee.) One incident 
came today, when at the urging of Karl Fogel, who runs 
http://questioncopyright.org, I looked into academic copyright -- 
specifically, what's the deal for the places TOS typically submits to 
(FIE and SIGCSE)?

A few hours and a quietly dawning horror later, I... think I've screwed 
up. My first couple co-submissions of work on teaching open source are, 
ironically, *unable* to be open-licensed. I've documented my naive 
findings here: 
http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/20/in-which-mel-is-saddened-and-bewildered-by-academic-copyright-assignments/

Please tell me that I'm missing something. How can we get 
academically-published TOS output released under open licenses? Why do 
we put up with this? Yes, I understand the publishing industry needs to 
make money and this "way of doing things" was well-intentioned at the 
time they were designed, but... but... why?

--Mel

PS: This isn't the only thing I've written about academic culture shock, 
btw -- for instance, 
http://blog.melchua.com/2011/08/17/academic-culture-shock-grad-student-ta-training/.