Cause against Argentinian professor for uploading texts by Derrida

[carobotero]

Last week I reproduced in my blog a post by argentinian blogger Patricio Lorente who was telling of another “piracy” related criminal suit. The special situation in this case is that the criminal offender is a professor at an Argentinian university that has been doing what many professors have done for centuries: facilitating the access to books for his students. He had a site devoted to Derrida and around the spanish text of this philosopher he also publish research results, has forums and many other resources knowledge. The use of ICT he is doing is "affecting" the commercial interest of publishers and he is now facing criminal cause. Here is a partial translation of Patricio’s post:

“In the late nineties, Horacio Potel, Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Lanús, fascinated by the possibilities offered by the internet, began a collection of essays and texts of his favorite thinkers. It started with a bit of Nietzsche and has since grown into a small library of philosophy on the web.

Potel is a man seduced by the thought of Jacques Derridá, so he developed a site about this Algerian philosopher. What this university teacher could not imagine is that his effort was a criminal enterprise.

Indeed, Derrida’s publisher (the author himself died in 2004) has filed a criminal complaint and the Argentine Chamber of Books has launched a case against Horacio Potel. In the meantime, it has forced Potel to take down the Derridá texts from his site. Potel is facing a criminal sentence of between one month and six years prison.

According to copyright law Horacio Potel has everything to lose. The president of the Argentine Chamber of Books justifies the procedure as follows: "without intellectual property rights publishing is not possible, nor is intellectual production.

However, this seems to be a clear example of what keeps happening without proofs or justifications: because it is not hard to imagine that Potel has given hundreds of thousands of Spanish-speaking readers to Derrida. His site, according to El Clarín’s article, receives four million hits."

[Carlos Boyle]

Some daya ago Iposted this in the collective political blog Artepolítica, based in this article from this other blog. These articles did not said anything new, but one of the comments that I recieved yes.