[PEN-L:9588] pen-l archives

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

>As you may remember, Don Roper, who houses the archive and has done a
>wonderful job, is worried (overly so, I believe) about the copyright
>problem.

This is fucking ridiculous. First it was getting censored over using
4-letter words, now it is making the archives virtually unusable. I was in
a debate on another forum with an LM'er who characterized indigenous
societies as a bunch of cannibals. I had scanned in a page or two from a
scholarly book sometime in 1998 refuting this claim and posted it to PEN-L.
Now I can't find the damned thing unless I go through 12 months of
archives?!?! Who is advising Roper? Mary Frances Berry?

My suggestion is that we accomodate him and not allow copyrighted material
to be posted to PEN-L, except the first paragraph and the URL. It is much
more important to be able to do a search on a subject than view an entire
article in your incoming mail.

On a more general level, this is just a symptom of the clash between a
democratic and activist culture and the academic origins of Listservs.
Today on H-Net I was looking at the archives of Latin-American history to
see if it might be useful in my research on Colombia. I was astonished at
the drivel that Latin America studies professors post there each day.
Nothing but scholastic trivia, job openings, journal announcements, etc.
Gramsci was right. Real intellectuals are those people who do it for love,
not money.

Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)