Re: Leontiev

nate (schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu)
Mon, 12 Jul 1999 11:21:50 -0500

Mike,

Just curious of what copyright-legal issues would be involved. I recently
was able to find *Psychology of Art* which for me posed a similar problem.
A very interesting book and important for a study of Vygotsky but has not
been available for purchase for some time know. It will probably not be
republished, so is their a harm in making it available online for those
interested in the work?

I know a motivation for the Marx/Engels site was getting online what had
been the role of *Progress Publishers* in Moscow. The fear/ motivation was
that those works if not put online would be lost forever. I know Vitaly,
Arcady, Bloch, and Price have permission from Sharp to republish *The
Problem of Activity in Psychology*, but I do not think any other Leontiev
writings are currently being republished.

MCA being associated with a University would seem to be covered by "fair
use". An issue of course with html is the authenticity of the work which
is why the electronic reserves at my university are in pdf. An issue with
"fair use" that I have read recently is the need to guarantee that the work
of the author/owner has not been changed in some way. As we saw with the
recent math problems that is more difficult with html. In pdf, for those
who are not aware the digital document is a facmile of the paper one, so
for example the printed copy would be identical to a photocopy from the
book.

Personally, I have been using pdf more and more to get copies of chapters,
articles etc into digital format. I think it is less time consuming than
converting to html and offers a degree of autheticity that html can't. In
contrast to photocopying one only has to copy the document once although it
may take a little longer.

My two cents.

Nate

----- Original Message -----
From: Mike Cole <mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
To: <xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Monday, July 12, 1999 9:19 AM
Subject: Leontiev

>
> I have a copy of *Problems of the Development of Mind* but I am afraid
> that someone has walked off with my copy of Activity, Consciousness, &
> Personality.
>
> Seems like one thing we could do collectively is to find a way to make
> such materials available to each other. Anyone got a plan?
> mike
>