Dear friends,

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.

Thanks and greetings to all,

Roberto Verzola
______________________________________________________

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.

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)

Prof. Horacio Potel's website Jacques Derrida in Spanish.

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@leseditionsdeminuit.fr), the Argentina
Book Chamber (Av. Belgrano 1580, Piso 4, C1093AAQ Buenos Aires, Argentina,
email: cal@editores.org.ar) and the Argentina
Federal Council of Education (Pizzurno 935, P.B. of. 5, C1020ACA Buenos Aires, Argentina, email: cfce@me.gov.ar).

30 March 2009
The CopySouth Research Group
contact@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.