No, the contract is "considered", as the authors get peer reviewed and published by a big brand name and the publisher gets to charge the readers - everybody gains something valuable.
What you refer to as "contract terms" are mostly part of copyright law and nothing to do with this specific contract, for example the copyright holder has "the exclusive right to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies" under copyright law which means that it is quite natural to transfer that exclusive right to a publisher thus preventing the author from making their own public copies. There is usually a contract term permitting authors to engage in ad-hoc sharing with colleagues for this reason. Likewise there is usually a contract term allowing authors to post their work to public-facing institutional/departmental web servers. (The original article linked to doesn't specify exactly what material was posted, I would speculate that somebody posted a bibliography or some other collection of papers in which they are not an author, and that is why the publisher is unhappy).
The publisher unquestionably delivers value to the author, their academic career rests on the value embodied in their peer review process and a typical article costs over $1000 to publish. There's certainly a conversation to be had about Elsevier and their policies but it does not include the phrase "Elsevier doesn't give the author anything", which defies logic.
What you refer to as "contract terms" are mostly part of copyright law and nothing to do with this specific contract, for example the copyright holder has "the exclusive right to produce copies or reproductions of the work and to sell those copies" under copyright law which means that it is quite natural to transfer that exclusive right to a publisher thus preventing the author from making their own public copies. There is usually a contract term permitting authors to engage in ad-hoc sharing with colleagues for this reason. Likewise there is usually a contract term allowing authors to post their work to public-facing institutional/departmental web servers. (The original article linked to doesn't specify exactly what material was posted, I would speculate that somebody posted a bibliography or some other collection of papers in which they are not an author, and that is why the publisher is unhappy).
The publisher unquestionably delivers value to the author, their academic career rests on the value embodied in their peer review process and a typical article costs over $1000 to publish. There's certainly a conversation to be had about Elsevier and their policies but it does not include the phrase "Elsevier doesn't give the author anything", which defies logic.