Should Marx and Engels be copyrighted?

[TexasTowelie]

The UK publisher Lawrence & Wishart has instructed the Marxist Internet Archive (MIA) to remove material from the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW) from its website by the end of this month (just in time for International Workers' Day on May 1). As Andrew Leonard asks at Salon, quoting the introduction to Volume 1 of MECW, 'I wonder — just how angry would Karl Marx get if he learned that the publisher of his collected works, in the name of maximizing profits, was using copyright law to hinder the cause of “equipping the working-class movement with the scientific ideology… for the realization… of communism”?' The publisher has justified its decision here. MIA has responded here. You can sign a petition protesting this outrageous decision here.

http://socialistworker.org/blog/critical-reading/2014/04/26/should-marx-and-engels-be-copy

[joshcryer]

1. Copyright is theft.

[bananas]

2. It wasn't always that way.

http://www.arl.org/focus-areas/copyright-ip/2486-copyright-timeline

The 1710 act established the principles of authors' ownership of copyright and a fixed term of protection of copyrighted works (fourteen years, and renewable for fourteen more if the author was alive upon expiration). The statute prevented a monopoly on the part of the booksellers and created a "public domain" for literature by limiting terms of copyright and by ensuring that once a work was purchased the copyright owner no longer had control over its use.

[joshcryer]

3. I accept no "protection period."

But I concede it was at least fairly reasonable when copyright came around.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

4. Current copyright law is insane.

At MOST, copyright should be the lifetime of the author or 25 years after publication, whichever is longer, and should ONLY be held by the author (or a family member after death within the 25 year window if the author died less than 25 years after publication). The author should be able to grant the "right to produce copies", but should never have the actual copyright be transferred to anyone else.

It is insane to extend copyright simply so that corporations can continue to have a stranglehold on wealth generation long after the death of the person who came up with those ideas.

Another reason among many to oppose the TPP as well.

[Jackpine Radical]

5. Abso--fuckin--lutely.

It's another assault on the commons, and completely antithetical to the principles Marx & Engels worked out for humanity.

K & Goddamit R!!!!1!!

[Agnosticsherbet]

6. They are not claiming copyright on all of Marx and Engels works.

What they claim is:

less well known works which have only been translated and published in recent years – as well as a number of volumes of correspondence

.

As long as their claim on copyright is limited as they say, to work not previously published and new translations, they should be able to claim that.

The bulk of the translated works of Marx and Engels are long out of copyright and in the public domain.