Karlo Marx and Fredrich Engels / Came to the checkout at the 7-11

I will happily play a youtuber for the cause.
~

Or, I presume still including the MECW for the next few days, you can pick up the MIA on 500 gb HD for only $86 which is somewhat less than $1500 from L & W. Of course, the Archive includes incredible additional value.

Don’t hammer the site too hard when copying it for offline use.
But copy the site for offline use.

wget -w 5 -mk –limit-rate=100k https://www.marxists.org

This one just gives me a sad. I went over to L & W and downloaded a couple free article collections. They ( and Verso, Historical Materialism, Pluto) ain’t exactly Elsevier. My guess is that the MECW shelf sold mostly to institutions was a major income base for L & W, and help fund a lot of the rest of the list. They likely let MIA slide for years (it’s a little hard to believe they were unaware) because MIA did the work of transcribing into electronic form, but now the hardbound shelf is declining in sales and maybe L & W need their own online version as an income stream. I don’t see how both MIA and L & W could have the same copies.

Or maybe not. Maybe the current publications cover their own publication costs and the overhead. But I doubt it.

The Web will have its casualties.

http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6231000/Marxists.org_-_full_English_language_archive

“We will hang the capitalists ourselves with the rope that they sell us.”
Motto of the Chinese Communist Party, but just as applicable here…

I am sure most of the stuff people would like to use, say for educational purposes like university classes, is sold by other presses and more cheaply in the paperback editions. I was thinking of teaching Capital in an intellectual history class. I would have assigned the on-line version, but now I am pretty sure my students and I can pick up the Penguin or Dover editions for a pittance. In either case I won’t be buying the hardback version from L & W. And if my library needed the hardback version of the collected works, I’d tell them to buy it used through Alibris or eBay or something.

I am trying to figure out the economic rationale, or business model. Even if L & W were going to post their own edition on-line, I doubt that they could actually make a buck from individual users. Maybe they are cleaning up their intellectual property profile to sell to an on-line database / intellectual property horde like Elseviere? I could see someone trying to sell an annual subscription to Marx & Engels collected works for a $1200 a year subscription instead of selling a paltry number of hardbacks.

I’d like to see a post on what Marx said that was both original and true.

I personally think this could easily be done in three or four paragraphs, as most of what Marx said was wrong or simply gibberish.

But that doesn’t mean Marx is unimportant. Indeed, as Peter Singer once famously said, in a sense “we are all Marxists now”. This includes conservatives, not that they would ever admit it.

I think Marx’s works sit unread on umpteen bookshelves as a signifier of one’s values and ideology. This is because reading them is like poking oneself in the eye-socket with a toothpick; it is far better to let others carry out this task and to read the better quality plain English interpretations.

Your unsubstantiated suggestion that MIA did not contact L&W, with the attendant implication that MIA “brought this on its own head” or “had it coming”, is absolutely untrue.
Despite its disagreement with bourgeois fantasies of “intellectual property”, MIA scrupulously observes copyright law for practical reasons, precisely in order to try to avoid this kind of unfortunate event. The development of relationships with copyright holders over an extended period of time has enabled MIA to put many works online.
Please check your facts before starting this kind of baseless rumour which can only damage the MIA.

I am sure that the Mises Institute has lots of wealthy oligarchs and proto-oligarchs to back them which allows them give such books away on the web. Left-wing radical publishers not so much.

That said, to pull these works on a claim of copyright is most most uncomradely and counter to the objective of spreading Marxist thought. Hats off to the folks who are torrenting it.

@13
“Maybe they are cleaning up their intellectual property profile to sell to an on-line database / intellectual property horde like Elseviere?”

My guess is that this, or some near iteration of it, is closest to the pin. L&W doesn’t just wake up one morning and suddenly decide their copyrights over decades old work that doesn’t earn anything are being infringed. They probably have plans to sell, lease, license the rights to someone and they decided to tidy up the paperwork to make it more attractive. A betting man would say put it all back up 6 months later and they won’t say a thing.

L&W have replied:
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/collected_works_statement.html

Oh and also: “if you were real radicals, you’d respect the sacred rights of Property.”

Looks like Matt_L hit the nail on the head:

I am trying to figure out the economic rationale, or business model. Even if L & W were going to post their own edition on-line, I doubt that they could actually make a buck from individual users. Maybe they are cleaning up their intellectual property profile to sell to an on-line database / intellectual property horde like Elseviere? I could see someone trying to sell an annual subscription to Marx & Engels collected works for a $1200 a year subscription instead of selling a paltry number of hardbacks.

From the L&W statement:

We are currently negotiating an agreement with a distributor that will offer a digital version of the Collected Works to university libraries worldwide. This will have the effect of maintaining a public presence of the Works, in the public sphere of the academic library, paid for by public funds. This is a model of commons that reimburses publishers, authors and translators for the work that has gone into creating a book or series of books.

They’re not ‘prevent[ing] people from reading Marx’, but demanding that people who use a specific translation, to which they own the copyright, do so with their permission.

Or else the cops will come for them.

You might want to change your handle.

Somehow I suspect that he will.

Hey, look, over there! abb1!

Who actually are the big donors to the Mises Institute? I vaguely recall hearing that there was some really old guy who died and then their funding dried up, but I’m not at all confident that was them. opensecrets.org only lists Mises PAC 2008, whose largest donor gave $800. We can presume its not the Kochs, since the Rothbardians tend to rant about the “Kochtopus”.

Pps. Copying the same email to everyone in their office probably doesn’t either.

It’s always nice, “engels,” to see you living up to the standard of your great namesake. In any conflict between capital and humanity, it’s our unsparing duty to ask capital to be nicer — as long as we don’t make a nuisance of ourselves.

I think Marx’s works sit unread on umpteen bookshelves as a signifier of one’s values and ideology. This is because reading them is like poking oneself in the eye-socket with a toothpick; it is far better to let others carry out this task and to read the better quality plain English interpretations.

Man, I completely agreed with this before I actually read something by Marx rather than taking other people’s word for it. One afternoon I needed to quickly check a quote in the XVIIIth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. Ended up reading it in one sitting. It was full of piss and vinegar and completely engaging.

Perhaps Capital really is a slog. It looks awfully thick! But I’m no longer going to assume it’s dreary without having tried it.

Capt M’Light:
I think Marx’s works sit unread on umpteen bookshelves as a signifier of one’s values and ideology. This is because reading them is like poking oneself in the eye-socket with a toothpick

I doubt Capt M’Light has read much if any Marx, b/c this judgment is pretty weird, to put it mildly.

Can someone clarify the actual copyright history? I’m mainly just curious for historical reasons. I mean, my volume one says (c) Progress Publishers, Moscow, just mentioning L&W as one of several folks involved in “preparing” it. I take them at their word when they say they own the translations but am curious how they ended up with it (and why it’s just for the first 10 vols). The money did come from Moscow, right? It’s such a massive project, not even a well-funded academic press could take it on now. And are there any underlying rights, for example to the original manuscripts in archives, etc.?

It’s not such a big deal for the left, since the stuff can be easily downloaded (which I’m doing as we speak, using a program called HTTrack) and will no doubt be mirrored and relatively easy to find for anyone who needs it. What’s a little sadder and just strange is that no scholarly press has taken over at least some of it – a modern critical edition of the letters, e.g.

My personal utopia would be a crowd-sourced (and retranslated) original Creative Commons edition at least of those first ten volumes, with updated footnotes, etc. Because among other things, MECW is pretty dated and seriously propagandistic to boot.

Sam: “My personal utopia would be a crowd-sourced (and retranslated) original Creative Commons edition at least of those first ten volumes, with updated footnotes, etc.”

The UCL project Transcribe Bentham is a good example to follow.
http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/transcribe-bentham/
Of course in the case of Marx a retranslation would involve much more work but project structure could still be learned from.

The big drawback with a paywalled university library subscription only version of classical works is that you can’t simply post a link to a specific section to anyone and be sure that they can access it.

These works are not some ancient birthright of the radical left, as has been implied by many of our critics.

This sentence aggravates me.

J Thomas: Big scary words! But surely no “undifferentiated chaos” would appear if the socially constructed and historically very shifting duration periods for intellectual property were modified to last only 20 years. More people would have access to, and make use of, intellectual resources and that would all in all be for the better.

QS, agreed.

On the face of it, this is a rather dry uninteresting topic. A publisher claims copyright over a valuable resource. Do they really own it, and should they? It’s only the connection with Marx that gives it poignancy.

We might get a similar effect from a battle over reprint rights to Abby Hoffman’s Steal This Book, particularly if Hoffman himself was suing.

Since the connection to Marx is the only thing that makes it a story, I can’t consider that a red herring.

And sure, I was trolling too. It looked like fun.

“But surely no “undifferentiated chaos” would appear if the socially constructed and historically very shifting duration periods for intellectual property were modified to last only 20 years. More people would have access to, and make use of, intellectual resources and that would all in all be for the better.”

I think it depends.

Usually the value of copyrights depreciates fairly rapidly. Publishers usually sell books like Kleenex, that get them out the door in whatever quantity might sell and pulp the excess, and whatever it was they sold 20 years ago, they’ve got plenty more to sell now. So most writers wouldn’t lose much if copyright was 20 years. The ones who do, it could be argued that they have produced something of big value to society that ought to be spread more by then. Maybe they could be put on a list of contributors to humanity, or get a frameable letter from the President or something.

But patents are different. Often it takes 10 years or more to get from patent to commercial product. And that process can cost a whole lot of money. A short patent run would often be completely useless.

So I tend to think, rather than have a 20 year patent we should look for better ways to encourage innovation. Patents don’t work well enough. Likely they often hinder innovation as much or more than they encourage it. This isn’t an approach that needs small tweaks, it just does not work well and it needs to be replaced.

L&W has updated their response to us on their web site.

David Walters
MIA Admin

@56

If profits were cut on the most successful books after some decent time — 20 years, 40 years, whatever — then prices on those continuing-successful books could drop which would be a good thing for society.

Publishers would have more incentive to make more tries when the total success was limited, but at the same time they might have less cash to fund new attempts. I’m not clear on that. Cheaper old books might tend slightly more to crowd out new books. Publishers that already had everything set up could would have lower costs than somebody new publishing a recently-uncopyrighted work, but that would still be less profit than if they had continuing monopolies.

If you’re a writer and your 20-year-old work turns public domain, that *might* be an advertisement for your recent work. But if it’s still selling well of course you’d hate to give up the cash just because the government decided you’d gotten enough rewards in the first 20 years.

I just don’t know.

Prior to the revision of copyright law, one had to renew the copyright twice, each for 28 years. That’s not the case here.

Registration mainly functioned to fleece non-American writers of their deserved royalties, the USA used to be notorious for copyright piracy as it was far to easy to fall victim to the arcane rules, renewal, although less of a problem, was a substantial headache and it was much too easy to accidentally lose copyright. The Berne rules tend to benefit the creators of works as it is automatic and of long duration.

One reason for having a life + term is that if copyright expired after a fixed period then someone who had created something in their youth and then little else, Harper Lee for example, might be left without an income in their old age. The continuing royalties can act effectively as pension. Having copyright expire on death or shortly afterwards would not give the publisher sufficient security to publish an elderly but still productive author, Jack Williamson for example who was 97 when his last novel was published, he might have had difficulty getting published when over 80 even though he lived almost another two decades.

Having a fairly long posthumous period is useful for those artists who die relatively young, which is why Italy had a life + 64 and Germany a Life + 70 following the second world war.

The EUs standardisation on life + 70 occurred because the only way to reconcile the Berne rule of least term (if two countries have different terms then for a national of the state with the shorter term that term applies for them in both) and the EU principal of non-discrimination (you cannot treat the nationals of another EU state less favourably than your own nationals, for example, by giving them a shorter copyright term) was if all EU states had the same term. Germany refused point blank to reduce its life + 70 partly due to the government of Bavaria wished to retain control of the works of Hitler. The UK and France both wanted to keep life + 50 but accepted that the Germans were determined to have their way.