
Although the above scenario seems ludicrous, that is almost exactly what is happening to scientific journal paper authors. We use grant money to conduct original research, pay a publisher to take our free (to them) paper, then they sell our paper over and over again, giving no profit to the original author. They even put caveats on the author's rights to distribute their own paper! It may have worked back when we needed publishers to print, bind, and distribute our papers, but with the advent of online journal paper repositories its clearly an outmoded system.
This issue was first raised by George Monbiot’s piece Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist published in The Guardian. There is another in depth discussion called Researchers! Stop doing free work for non-open journals! and in Authors versus publishers written by the team at SV-POW!. They have been covering this issue for a while now, and it will be interesting to see where it goes...