A French publishing company, Les Editions de Minuit, has brought criminal charges against a professor in Argentina for making Spanish translations of classic works of philosophy available for free on the internet, including Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. In February, Les Editions de Minuit filed a complaint which was then sent to the French Embassy in Argentina and, probably because of multilateral law enforcement treaties, the Argentina Book Chamber brought legal action against Professor Horacio Potel.

Ironically, Les Éditions de Minuit began as an underground publishing company in Paris in 1941, as part of the resistance to the German occupation of France. The Nazi occupiers controlled all media and publishing and, therefore, Les Éditions de Minuit’s founders were fighting against state control of information.

Decades later, the people who now run this French company insist that they “own” important philosophical works and, therefore, will use the force of governments to shut down any unauthorized distribution of these works. In Argentina, around 90% of academic books are imported from Spain and, therefore, are priced in euros, making them extremely expensive. Professor Potel was helping to make this knowledge available to people who don’t live in Buenos Aires and who don’t have the money to purchase expensive imports from Europe.

Les Éditions de Minuit has been very open about their intention to aggressively pursue action against anyone who violates their ownership of these philosophical thoughts: “Horacio Potel has posted, over the course of several years, without authorisation, and free of charge, full versions of several of Jacques Derrida’s works, which is harmful to the diffusion of his (Derrida)’s thought.”

This enforcement of copyright has started to border on the surreal, with the Argentina Book Chamber instigating a police raid at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires, ostensibly searching for copyright violations.

As the values of free software sweep across Latin America, the logical extension that the collected wisdom of humanity should also be free and open. This has been most evident in Venezuela, which has held International Forums on Free Knowledge in Maracaibo. As for Professor Potel, he maintains that this French company does not have the right to speak on behalf of philosophers such as Derrida and that “they have inflicted a new death on the philosopher by taking his work off the internet.”