[p2p-research] Fwd: CopySouth Report on Horacio Potel

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Caroline,

Met your sister yesterday, what a dynamite family you have!

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nanci Oddone <neoddone at gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 6:25 AM
Subject: CopySouth Report on Horacio Potel
To: COPYSOUTH-READER-RESPONSE at jiscmail.ac.uk


You may read a formatted version of the CopySouth Report on Horacio Potel at
http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/copysouth/en/horacio_potel_en.htm Argentinean
professor charged criminally for promoting access to knowledge By the
CopySouth Research Group A philosophy professor in Argentina, Horacio Potel,
is facing criminal charges for maintaining a website devoted to translations
of works by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. His alleged crime: copyright
infringement. Here is Professor Potel’s sad story. “I was fascinated at the
unlimited possibilities offered by the internet for knowledge exchange”,
explains Horacio Potel, a Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad
Nacional de Lanús in Buenos Aires. In 1999, he set up a personal website to
collect essays and other works of some well-known philosophers, starting
with the German Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Potel’s websites –
Nietzsche in Spanish, Heidegger in Spanish and Derrida in Spanish –
eventually developed into growing online libraries of freely downloadable
philosophical texts. Nietzsche in Spanish alone has already received more
than four million visitors. One of Potel’s best known websites,
www.jacquesderrida.com.ar focused on his favourite French philosopher,
Algerian-born Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), who was the founder of
“deconstruction”. On this website Potel posted many of the philosopher’s
works, translated into Spanish, as well as discussion forums, research
results, biographies, images and the usual pieces of information typical of
this type of online resource. "I wanted to share my love for philosophy with
other people. The idea was disseminating the texts and giving them some sort
of arrangement" declares Potel. To Potel, what he was doing was what
professors have done for centuries: helping students to get access to
knowledge. “It is not possible to find the same comprehensive collection of
works that was available at Derrida’s and Heidegger’s websites either in
libraries or in bookstores in Argentina”, says Potel. In fact, only two
bookstores in Argentina’s largest city, Buenos Aires, carry some books by
Derrida and many of his works are seldom available to readers. Potel spent
decades visiting libraries and bookstores to collect the material he posted
on his online library. “Many of those texts are already out of print”, he
says. Books that are out of print cannot be purchased, but they are often
still protected by copyright laws. Furthermore, Potel finds the prices
charged by foreign publishers, such as the Mexican companies Porrua and Cal
y Arena, “prohibitive” by Argentinean standards. He gives as an example the
price of a recently published booklet of a conference given by Derrida.
Printed in large typeface, the booklet has about eighty pages, although the
text would certainly fit in twelve. It was being sold for 162 Argentinean
pesos, around 42 US dollars at current exchange rates. Even at that steep
price copies were very hard to find within two weeks after they arrived in
Argentina. Potel relates how he had to walk around Buenos Aires for an
entire afternoon in order to find a single copy of the booklet. But the
price of foreign books is not the only concern in this case. For Derrida’s
works to be accessible to the Spanish-speaking world they have to be
translated. While the Spanish versions of the texts available on the website
were not done by him, Potel made corrections to a few of them, since some of
Derrida’s Spanish language books have been quite poorly translated. To make
the texts easier to understand for readers, Potel also linked each
translation to the original text, as well as to other works cited by
Derrida. Eventually, Potel’s popular website caught the attention of a
publisher. A criminal case against Potel was initiated on December 31, 2008
after a complaint was lodged by a French company, the publishing house Les
Éditions de Minuit. They have published only one of Derrida’s books and it
was in French. Minuit’s complaint was passed on to the French Embassy in
Argentina and it became the basis of the Argentina Book Chamber’s legal
action against Potel. The Argentina Book Chamber boasts of its doubtful
precedents of having been responsible for a police raid at the Faculty of
Arts and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires and for having managed to
condemn some professors for encouraging the students to photocopy books and
articles. “The view of the police entering the Puán building is remembered
with astonishment by many members of the academic community” says a report.
The next possible effects of the legal action against Potel are the
wiretapping of his phone line, the interception of his email accounts and an
incursion into his house to “determine the actual place where the illegal
act occurred”. Potel has already removed all the content from his website, a
decision which he regards as a tragedy. “These websites are my best work.
They are the result of many hours of work and have been entirely funded by
me”, he says. Those who access www.jacquesderrida.com.ar today find a
warning: “This website has been taken down due to a legal action initiated
by the Argentina Book Chamber”. Potel insists that he “never intended to
make a profit” out of Derrida’s works. Yet he faces a possible criminal
sentence of one month up to six years in prison for violation of Argentina’s
intellectual property laws, according to a February 28, 2009 story by the
online version of Argentina's largest newspaper, Clarín. If Derrida was
alive, he would probably be thanking Potel for bringing translations of his
texts to millions of Spanish-speaking readers, who otherwise would never
have had the opportunity to read the works of the French philosopher. Here’s
what the founder of deconstruction said about freedom within the university:
“And yet I maintain that the idea of this space of the academic type has to
be symbolically protected by a kind of absolute immunity, as if its interior
were inviolable; I believe (this is like a profession of faith which I
address to you and submit to your judgment) that this is an idea that we
must reaffirm, declare, and profess endlessly. [...] This freedom of
immunity of the university and par excellence of its Humanities is something
to which we must lay claim, while committing ourselves to it with all our
might. Not only in a verbal and declaratory fashion, but in work, in act and
in what we make happen with events.” (Jacques Derrida, “The University
Without Condition” in Without Alibi, ed. & trans. by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford
University Press, 2002, p. 210) Those who profess to “protect” Derrida’s
“intellectual property rights” are now persecuting a professor who is simply
following the French philosopher’s teachings and popularising them in the
Spanish-speaking world. The CopySouth Research Group calls on the Argentina
Book Chamber and the government of Argentina to drop these criminal charges
immediately and to respect and protect professor Potel’s academic freedom in
providing popular access to philosophical works. In any conflict between
intellectual property and the right to education and to access knowledge, we
choose education and we urge those who share the same concerns to spread the
word widely and rapidly. You can send letters to Les Éditions de Minuit (7
Rue Bernard Palissy, 75006 Paris 06, France, email:
contact at leseditionsdeminuit.fr), the Argentina Book Chamber (Av. Belgrano
1580, Piso 4, C1093AAQ Buenos Aires, Argentina, email: cal at editores.org.ar)
and the Argentina Federal Council of Education (Pizzurno 935, P.B. of. 5,
C1020ACA Buenos Aires, Argentina, email: cfce at me.gov.ar). 30 March 2009 The
CopySouth Research Group contact at copysouth.org The CopySouth Research Group
(CSRG) was established in 2005. The CSRG is composed of researchers and
activists in more than 15 countries and conducts research on a range of
copyright and related issues in the global South. Copies of the 210-page
CopySouth Dossier are available as a free download (in English and Spanish)
on its website (www.copysouth.org). _________________ Note: This report is
based on information collected from Horacio Potel and from several other
sources, including the article on the online version of the Argentinean
newspaper Clarín, a blog post by Patricio Lorente translated by Carolina
Botero and a Wikipedia entry on Horacio Potel.



-- 
Working at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhurakij_Pundit_University -
http://www.dpu.ac.th/dpuic/info/Research.html -
http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI

Volunteering at the P2P Foundation:
http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net -
http://p2pfoundation.ning.com

Monitor updates at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by SHIFTN,
http://www.shiftn.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090404/d7438cb6/attachment.html>