Horacio Potel and The Pirate Bay
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- “Dear friends,” says Roberto Verzola on News Grist, “Please circulate widely this story about how a philosophy professor in Argentina is being persecuted for making available on his Web site Spanish translations of Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher who died in 2004.”
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 Lanu´s 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.
Click here for more, and meanwhile, “The Internet Society Philippines’ (ISOC-PH) Public Policy Principles and activities are based upon a fundamental belief that ‘The Internet is for everyone’,” it says, going on »»»
ISOC-PH upholds and defends core values that allow people throughout the world to enjoy the benefits of the Internet.
Recent developments, however, demonstrate an alarming growth towards a “license culture” on the Internet, imposed by the criminalization of those whose culture and society advance creativity, innovation and economic opportunity through the values of openness, sharing, education and collaboration.
Philosophy professor Horacio Potel from Argentina is facing criminal charges for maintaining a personal and educational website devoted to Spanish translations of works by French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
A court in Sweden has found the four men behind “The Pirate Bay”, a file-sharing website, guilty of breaking copyright law and were sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay $4.5m (£3m) in damages.
The Ability to Share is one of ISOC’s core values. The many-to-many architecture of the Internet makes it a powerful tool for sharing, education, and collaboration. It has enabled the global open source community to develop and enhance many of the key components of the Internet, such as the Domain Name System and the World-Wide Web, and has made the vision of digital libraries a reality. To preserve these benefits we will oppose technologies and legislation that would inhibit the freedom to develop and use open source software or limit the well-established concept of fair use, which is essential to scholarship, education, and collaboration.
We will also oppose excessively restrictive governmental or private controls on computer hardware or software, telecommunications infrastructure, or Internet content. Such controls and restrictions substantially diminish the social, political, and economic benefits of the Internet.
The wire-tapping, searches and seizures, the removal of website content and the criminal charges against professor Potel of the University of Buenos Aires is an onslaught on human rights and academic freedom in Argentina and on the Internet.
The police seizures of servers, the enormous bill for damages and the jail sentence on Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom and Peter Sunde is a defiance of the social and cultural institution of file-sharing in Sweden and on the Internet.
ISOC-PH founding member and lawyer Michael Dizon writes, “Putting greater emphasis on the development of social or community norms and how people can actively participate in the creation of these norms … may be more advantageous in advancing creative culture than resorting to contractual agreements. Ideally, laws (and the licenses that seek to enforce rights based on these laws) should embody and uphold the norms and values of a community, and not the other way around.”
As founding president of the newly rejuvenated ISOC-Philippines Chapter, I would like to dispute some of the statements being made regarding the Pirate Bay trials, in particular, by John Kennedy, Chairman and CEO of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry. Mr Kennedy says,
“This is good news for everyone, in Sweden and internationally, who is making a living or a business from creative activity and who needs to know their rights will protected by law.”
In keeping with the ISOC-PH mandate, I find it offensive to the diversity of cultures on the Internet the claim that the global model of copyright protection being imposed upon the developers and users of the Internet is “good news for everyone.”
I also find it hard to accept the sincerity of Mr Kennedy’s statement about “making a living or a business from creative activity.” In fact only a handful of media corporations have effectively taken over what used to be a very diverse field of creative activity.
Such a process of consolidation and privatization has created gross inequality between artists and the big media corporations: relations between artists and recording companies are replete with exploitative contracts and bitter legal struggles for control; and royalties and other earnings from copyright constitute only a fraction of the income of most active professional artists.
The Pirate Bay trials and the criminal charges against professor Potel are a threat to academic freedom and free speech, and they undermine the Internet core value of the Ability to Share. If we envision a future in which people in all parts of the world can use the Internet to improve their quality of life, then freedom, and not a “license culture”, must be obtained for professor Potel, the Pirate Bay founders and the Internet communities of sharing.
ISOC-PH calls on all Internet citizens to demand freedom.
Fatima Lasay
President
Internet Society Philippines Chapter
http://isoc.ph/portal/
Quezon City, Philippines
April 20, 2009
Stay tuned.
(Cheers, Seth)
News Grist – Argentinean professor charged criminally for promoting access to knowledge, April 4, 2009
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