Two years ago, Representative Smith tried unsuccessfully to craft a bill that would deal with the issues. Now the effort is being undertaken anew. I blogged about it at Collectanea earlier today and would refer our readers there for links to other sites that are registering their optimism and concerns. A new bill has not yet been introduced, but it is reportedly going to be introduced as early as this week.

From reporters and young photographers in Montevideo, we learned of the arrest on December 17, 2007, of self-appointed Uruguayan President Gregorio Alvarez (1983-1985) and about subsequent public demonstrations in support of the court’s call for the ex-dictator to face justice. Media estimate that about 2,000 people spontaneously congregated in the centrally located Plaza de La Libertad.

Alvarez has been charged with illegal imprisonment, torture and murders committed outside national borders as well as implicated in crimes orchestrated internationally that resulted in substantial financial gains for the perpetrators. After reviewing his appeals, the Supreme Court determined that the crimes of which Alvarez is accused are not exempt by Uruguay’s Ley de Caducidad. That law forms part of the general amnesty extended to the military involved in the years of repressive government between 1973 and 1985.

Finalized in 1986, the amnesty agreements include the Ley de Caducidad and the complementary Ley de Amnistia. Together the laws represent an extraordinary compromise put in motion by members of the military then still in power and the various political factions aspiring to the presidency of the reestablished democratic government.

The amnesty provided immunity for military excesses as well as for the acts of guerillas and insurgents. Many guerillas were imprisoned during the early 1970s for their involvement in bank robberies, kidnappings, and bombings as well as for committing as many, if not more murders than the military. The amnesty also proved helpful in freeing several key political figures jailed for their opposition politics or more seriously abetting the radical tactics of the insurgents.

According to recent reports, Alvarez has joined ten other high-ranking military and police officials from the military dictatorship that ruled Uruguay between 1973 and 1985.  All of them now are held in Domingo Arena, a prison specifically constructed to house military detainees. Ex-Navy Captain Juan Carlos Larcebeau and retired Colonel Carlos Calcagno are similarly charged. Extensive documentation and testimony collected over the last thirty years has connected each of the accused with the disappearance of specific individuals.

Already held at the Domingo Arena facility are José Niño Gavazzo, Gilberto Vázquez, Jorge Silveira, Luis Maurente, Ricardo Medina, José Sande and Ricardo Arab who were arrested in 2006 in connection with the elaborate transport to Argentina and eventual disappearance of various Uruguayan insurgents including militant communist party leader Adalberto Soba Fernández.

The abstract of the legal brief indicting the now aged and ailing Uruguayan ex-President may be found at the foot of the relevant article in La Republica 21. For the full text of the plaintiffs’ case refer to La denuncia de Izurralde y Santana contra el ex-dictador Gregorio Alvarez .

Gregorio Alvarez has repeatedly affirmed his innocence and lack of knowledge about any coordinated activities with neighboring countries.

I suppose that this assertion captured my attention as not too long ago, while browsing through the stacks of the Benson Latin American Collection, I came upon a book labeled  “El rol de las fuerzas armadas en el proceso político uruguayo : texto de las conferencias pronunciadas por el Sr. presidente de la República Oriental de Uruguay.” The book, published in 1984 by the Instituto de Estudios Latinoamericanos in Buenos Aires, Argentina, is supposedly authored by one Gregorio Alvarez, born in 1925.  Unfortunately, our book was miscataloged and the text that is bound within the covers is something else of a similar nature but published by the same institute several years later.

Thirteen other research libraries in the United States listed in the OCLC Worldcat  indicate that they hold copies of the Alvarez book, so I have requested a copy through my library’s interlibrary loan service. You might try to do the same.

In the city, what do its workers do when the editorial houses, newspapers, academies, theatres and movie houses close? What happens when 400,000 people of a population of 3 million leave a country over a period of twenty years? Who or what fills this vacuum and with what substance? What is now possible for people once excluded from active participation in these institutions? What resources and interests do they have?

A digital mirror

I have to ask myself these questions as I sort through the catalog of items owned by the university’s libraries—over 15,000 written, recorded and published by Uruguayans about some aspect of Uruguay geography, nature, economy, politics, cultures, architecture, military, literature, its young, old, poor, sick. We even have books published at different dates about the state-of-the-art in orthodontics in Uruguay, of interest if only because they are illustrated.

Every month, library staff trundle off hundreds of these books for digitization at some facility and return them after this adventure back to their customary shelves to wait for someone, like me, to pull them off the shelf again and make their acquaintance. The process of digitization far outstrips our desire and ability to make these books available online. We know that a large majority of these books will not reveal the content of its pages for decades as long as copyright laws protected them. So why go through this expense?

The original impulse for Google to undertake this massive program was to make the books discoverable. That is, make it easy for people to come across the titles online, become acquainted with the books, and abracadabra, buy them. Never mind that most of these books are out of print or only available in local markets, not to be found at the fingertips, of say, the 400, 000 Uruguayans living far from home who might be interested in something about themselves.

The books that Google had in mind for their venture were not these from our research collections with relative little economic but incalculable cultural interest; however, recognizing the uniqueness of the Benson Latin American Collection Google still negotiated with the University of Texas to duplicate as much as possible of the entire collection.

Of course, there are persuasive institutional arguments to persist with the digitization so the process goes on. For one, we have learned after several natural disasters that the safest thing to do to preserve texts is to reproduce them, a version of the LOCKSS principle, Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. Dozens of people are kept busy with this activity and many more with the debate as to why and whether it should be done, what it all means for whom, and who pays.

In the case of the digitization of the library books, Google has the incentive to pick up most of the present costs with the hopes that readers will click the various commercial links on their search pages. Ostensibly, this generates consumer traffic.

As far as accessing the full-text of the books, copyright remains an insoluble bottleneck. After the books are digitized and cataloged, only the bibliographical information and a few snippets, sometimes pages, are displayed on line. But, suppose, that copyright issues did not exist, what difference would it make it to have the full-text of these books online? And, how could we know how and to whom it would make a difference?

New cultural patterns

Uruguayan cultural meteorologist, Pablo Rocco, is right to note the multiple factors acting to inhibit older, still familiar patterns of interaction among artists, writers, musicians and their publics, resulting in the desertion and eventual disappearance of many centrally located public places like cafés, theatres, and bookstores. These were the places where artists shaped their style, demeanor, arguments and inserted themselves into national and international cultural movements in literature, theatre, music, and the plastic and graphic arts.

Today, however, demonstrations and performances enliven plazas and create interest along familiar streets now flanked by hotels, office buildings, conference centers but also with cafes, bookstores, movie houses. For the literate and cultured groups that have been forced by circumstances to the periphery of urban life, there are now online journals, interactive radio productions, and virtual workshops. Thoughtful examples of these are Abrapalabra, El Espectador’s Café Torrado and Gabriela Onetto’s Letras Virtuales.

Further away but with increasing effect and importance to Uruguay-and the rest of the world- are the various solidarity groups exiled in Spain, in the U.S. and other parts of Latin America who contribute remittances as well as support for the Madres y Familiares de Uruguayos Detenidos-Desaparecidos and similar associations. Other groups have coalesced to take up issues related to the environment, sustainability, violence against women, gay rights, and inequality.

We will turn to these lugares de encuentro-places of encounter-over the next few weeks to inquire about the roles the old Lucuix library and the Benson Latin American Collection play in the movement of cultures across continents.

Photos courtesy of Marco Lovatto, Google Earth I.D. 1102615; and L. Yomango at rebelArte

How Lucuix used his library

This treasure trove reveals details about his personal life, tastes, and habits as well as many clues about how Lucuix utilized his library to provide reference and research services to others. His correspondence includes requests from historians, journalists, legislators, and students for books and specific information; there are related notes of thanks for his support, often acknowledged by gift books from the author. A particularly explicit request from Conrado Monfort entreats Lucuix to provide him with materials about the French biologist Saint Hilaire and other explorers who had passed through the Rio Negro basin. Monfort, owner of El Litoral–a newspaper in Fray Bentos, Uruguay–was planning a surprise commemorative issue of the newspaper, about which Monfort pleaded Lucuix keep in confidence. Lucuix maintained a fruitful correspondence with directors of various research centers, embassies, and the ministries of several countries who provided him with current publications.

Documents in the office files suggest that the sale of the Lucuix library was arranged through none other than Nettie Lee Benson. Benson, at the time, represented the collective acquisitions program for several US research universities in Latin America under the sponsorship of New York publisher and bookseller, Stechert-Hafner. Between 1961 and 1963, Benson traveled throughout Latin America in search of publishers, booksellers, government agencies, university presses, and authors willing to provide multiple copies for resale by Stechert-Hafner, which in turn fulfilled purchase orders from research libraries in the United States. Benson’s directive was to locate sources of recent publications but during her trips, she heard of the availability of complete libraries such as the Lucuix.

The purchase of the library by the University of Texas

So far, I have not found any clues about the person or persons who linked Benson to Lucuix. Don Simon purchased books from various Montevidean booksellers including Adolfo Linardi, El Librero de la Feria, and Barreiros y Ramos. In Buenos Aires, he dealt with the Libreria La Incognita and the Libreria del Plata but probably did business with many other dealers internationally. The University of Texas purchased the Lucuix library on November 1, 1963. According to the bill of sale signed by Lucuix, his library of 21,363 books was packed into 604 boxes bailed into 10 shipping containers. The purchase amount was US$40,000.00, the equivalent of US $275,000 today.

Of the purchases recorded in the annual reports of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), the Lucuix was by far the largest single collection acquired by a member library during the 1960s. Other collections acquired by American universities between 1961 and 1971 seldom mounted to more than 2,000 to 3,000 titles, which makes it more surprising and intriguing to find so little information about the Lucuix library. More details about the purchase wait to be discovered in the Benson archives.

It is likely that economic circumstances forced Lucuix to sell his books.

During the 1960s, inflation battered Uruguay. When demand for wool and grain declined after the Korean War, the Uruguayan government attempted to revive the national economy by borrowing and encouraging production for domestic consumption but finally succumbed to devaluing its currency. Once Europe reconstructed their industries and the United States recovered from the wars began to export, Uruguay’s outdated industries could not compete. The related unemployment, breakdown in services and industrial failures set off an economic crisis that triggered union and student protests and escalated into urban guerilla warfare uncontrollable by the police. A conservative government brought back in 1966, unable to quash the activities of the Tupamaros and other less violent opposition groups, eventually established a military council, unleashing the worst sort of repressive measures that lasted until 1985. This period of stagnation and dictatorship set off a wave of emigration and a brain drain from which Uruguay is still recuperating.

Contrast in economic conditions

In contrast, the U.S. economy was expanding rapidly during the years after World War II. Funds never or since available to research libraries flowed from federal government programs and philanthropic institutions anxious to learn more about the cultures and the stability of governance structures of countries in Latin America. Whole collections of books, and with it habits and mentalities, could be purchased and were.

According to a 1983 interview by Stanley R. Ross with Benson, the monies allocated to the Latin American Collection by the University of Texas President Harry Ransom came from gift funds about which she knew nothing. In hindsight, this statement appears disingenuous, as American universities were mounting huge area study programs funded by the federal government through taxes allocated for the National Defense Education Act of 1958. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations also made large contributions to these efforts. To date, many regard the 1960s as the golden age of research libraries. Support for the development of comprehensive research libraries stemmed from the belief that the strength of area studies served the interests of many disciplines such as geography, anthropology, and language arts.

Today the incentives for developing, enhancing, and sharing research collections are different but as laden with the politics and economics of knowledge as before.

Graphics: Gaucho by Federico Reilly in PaginaGaucho

Google sponsors meetings of all of the library partners, and at our meeting in July in Ann Arbor, U Mich talked about its effort to augment Google’s public domain (pd) determinations with additional research of its own to move the U.S. pd date line from 1923 to whatever date really applied for individual works, based on either their renewal or non-renewal (for works published between 1923 and 1964), or their government works status (no protection at all). We here at UT were very excited about this effort (which I have greatly simplified here). In my role at UT’s Libraries, I had been looking for projects that might blend my existing copyright expertise with my evolving interests in the future of libraries in a networked world, and this seemed to fit the bill. Se we jumped in with both feet. We were lucky enough to get Maria to help us, with her extensive knowledge of the Benson and the ability to design a data collection database for us. We are about to test some of Michigan’s pd determinations for them, to confirm their process, or help them to tweak it if need be. So, we are just about ready to start our own data collection, to begin making pd determinations for our many foreign works, and right away we hit a big, big snag.

U.S. copyright law is complicated enough. I’ve always been horrified at how complicated it is. Check out the link in our sidebar called “Flow chart.” It shows in flow chart form how to make pd determinations for U.S. works. But that is nothing compared to the charts Maria began producing for us that showed the flow for pd determinations in some of our foreign jurisdictions. Geez. As I began to see these, I immediately started looking for a way out of what seemed like a totally NOT SCALABLE process. Of course, there is a way out, because we are in the U.S. Our law gives a set term of protection to foreign works that were not published here (many of which works, until 1996 GATT, were pd in this country for failure to comply with our requirements to use copyright notices and register renewals, etc.) — it’s 95 years from the date of publication. We had originally thought that we should establish pd status for the work in its country of origin, in addition to establishing the status for the work here in the U.S. But as I began to see how complication had been raised to an art form in some of these foreign jurisdictions, I began to realize that we probably could not offer anything of use for those countries, but discouragement. It’s not just that their statutes are, like ours, seemingly designed to obscure public domain status. Rather, it’s the proliferation of presidential proclamations, bilateral and multi-lateral treaty declarations, and difficulty in determining the relationship of such add-ons to the statutes themselves, that made the job of saying what the pd status of a work in its country of origin might be, just too impossible. One has to practically be an expert on U.S. copyright law to opine about pd status in this country. It’s just not practical for someone who doesn’t even speak the language to try to interpret foreign laws and come up with a pd determination. So, this is a big gap that we are not likely going to be able to effectively fill for our foreign works.

That’s not to say that we won’t contribute what we learn about our works to the public for its use. It’s just that we won’t likely be able to come to a determination in many, if not most, cases.

Next time I’ll talk about the “rule of the shorter term,” a Berne Convention mechanism that, for most Berne countries, allows use of the shorter term to determine pd status when two or more jurisdictions are involved in a use.

As of this week, several thousand books have been digitized and about two hundred titles in the public domain are free for your use through Google Book Search

This first sample of full-view texts revealed the bookplate of an important component collection purchased for the Benson in 1963, the Simon Lucuix Rio de la Plata Library. The simple 3 x 5 inch black and white sticker is unexceptional except for the image of an ombu tree at the center. The ombu, symbol of the pampas and gaucho culture, grows to 120 feet and can live over 500 years, providing comfort and shelter under its broad canopy.

The Lucuix purchase added 21,000 books to the Benson Latin American Collection, a phenomenal acquisition for the Benson, which at the time consisted of fewer than 200,000 volumes, but an incomprehensible feat for a collector in Uruguay. Catalog records of the Lucuix books show titles published between 1698 and 1957 in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, France, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Spain, Uruguay as well as in the United Kingdom and the United States covering subjects from art and architecture to history, chemistry and medicine. Few libraries in Uruguay of equal scope and size existed in Montevideo in the 1960s.

Who was Simon Lucuix (Loo-Kwee(sh)) and how did he amass such an outstanding collection?

We learn from tidbits gathered through the authority files of the Library of Congress and OCLC Identities that Simon S. Lucuix was a professor and editor of Revista Nacional, the journal of the Instituto Historico y Geografico del Uruguay in Montevideo. None of the biographical dictionaries on hand show an entry for Lucuix, but from information about his works we learn that between 1952 and 1959 he edited several publications or provided forewords for them. As late as 1962, an issue of the Revista Nacional was published under Lucuix’s name.

A colleague in Montevideo, Julio Cesar Cotelo, wrote to share what he remembered of Don Simon. Cotelo, author of Influencia del Pensamiento de Artigas en el Congreso de abril de 1813, knew Lucuix and visited his home as a young man. Lucuix’s home presently houses the Lebanese Embassy on Avenida General Rivera, perhaps a sign that Lucuix had amassed some wealth. Lucuix counted historian Felipe Ferreiro (1892-1963) and entrepreneur Octavio Assuncao among his friends. Assuncao, also a collector, bequeathed various significant works to museums and libraries in Uruguay. His son, Fernando O. Assuncao (1931-2006) wrote many books about gaucho folklore, for which Lucuix wrote the prologues.

According to Cotelo, Lucuix frequented the Barreiro y Ramos bookstore and the Café Sorocabana next to the Plaza Libertad, for decades the meeting place of poets, painters, dramatists, politicians and academics. The intellectual life of Uruguay flowed out to the rest of the world past Montevideo, its epicenter, where ideas were tried-out, debated, filtered, edited and finally made public by the editorial and publishing establishments there. The bookstore and the unforgettable café have closed. Many political, economic and urban design changes conspired to close the spaces that cuddled and provoked thought.

Where did the public intellectual life of Montevideo go when the Sorocabana and other cafes closed? What new spaces attract and bring together artists, writers, journalists, politicians with those that support them or hate them?

I will be writing on these topics and adding more details about Don Simon’s collection as I gather them over the next two or three weeks.

What? you say, why in the world would I want to discuss copyright on a blog?

Well, copyright laws are what make the difference between reading several pages, a snippet or all of a text from that computer on your lap or desktop. Conservative interpretation of the laws and difficulty ascertaining authorship or even finding an author often keep books with little or no commercial value from use by researchers. Without access to a large well-stocked research library, few researchers can tap published data collected over time and great expense. This is true of all sorts of reports by governments about demographic, economic, geological, hydrological, health, legislative, production data to name a few. You really have to ask why and what can be done about it.

Same goes for all those books on subjects like folklore, heraldry and numismatics seldom consulted because few scholars with interest in these texts can travel to far-flung libraries to read them.
 
Here at the University of Texas at Austin we have riches of the Benson Latin American Collection. Bit by bit this collection is appearing on line but many books will remain on the shelves protected by copyright but undiscovered. I’ll be commenting on our findings as the books are digitized.

Sometimes it is just a matter of weeks or months until a book already in the public domain appears online. Determining the copyright status of books is painstaking, time-consuming work and doubly difficult for books published internationally. Copyright terms vary from 50 to 100 years from publication or the death of an author. Figuring this out is not simple–just take a look at our links!   

By the way, if you haven’t tried, click on “Google Book Search” in the right hand bar.
Look yourself up. Several authors have been surprised to discover citations and acknowledgment of their books, chapters, articles, and forgotten reports written long ago.

Better yet, talk to your publisher about moving your work to the public domain.