New U.S. Copyright Search in Works

This might come in handy some day.  Hopefully it will be expanded back in time beyond 1978.  That would make reprinting older books of unknown or uncertain copyright status a lot easier to do. 

U.S. Copyright Office - Records

"In mid August, the Copyright Office will launch a powerful new records search system that accesses more than 20 million digital records of registrations and recorded documents from 1978 to the present. The new system allows searching by title, name, keyword, and registration or document number. Through a command keyword search, elements of any or all fields can be combined to search the records.

Users can also search by type of work, such as sound recordings, dramas, motion pictures, visual materials, or preregistrations. The search method combines three separate databases that previously permitted only limited searching. The search tool uses Voyager software, the same system used by the Library of Congress Online Catalog."

New U.S. Copyright Search in Works

This might come in handy some day.  Hopefully it will be expanded back in time beyond 1978.  That would make reprinting older books of unknown or uncertain copyright status a lot easier to do. 

U.S. Copyright Office - Records

"In mid August, the Copyright Office will launch a powerful new records search system that accesses more than 20 million digital records of registrations and recorded documents from 1978 to the present. The new system allows searching by title, name, keyword, and registration or document number. Through a command keyword search, elements of any or all fields can be combined to search the records.

Users can also search by type of work, such as sound recordings, dramas, motion pictures, visual materials, or preregistrations. The search method combines three separate databases that previously permitted only limited searching. The search tool uses Voyager software, the same system used by the Library of Congress Online Catalog."

The Future from Latin America

Two articles in the Yes! magazine issue on cooperative activities in Argentina and Venezuela deserve highlighting, imo, and so here they are with an associated snippet.  I see cooperatives of these types as the only long-term and sustainable way out of the current political-economic-ecological messes we're increasingly finding ourselves.

The fact that worker-cooperatives can be successful as non-hierarchical or limited hierarchy systems certainly will spill over in a positive way into the local economy and political systems.  The Argentinian experiment is the more interesting of the two to me currently because there's no petro-economy to sponsor and support such activities.  They seem to be largely home-grown and spontaneous.  Maybe the anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin was right in his "The Conquest of Bread" (1906) and "Fields, Factories and Workshops" (1912) writings which I had come to view as being too utopian in nature.

Horizontalidad: Where Everyone Leads by Marina Sitrin
Argentina's workers took over factories, citizens took over the streets—no one seemed to miss having a boss.

"The popular rebellion of 2001 was comprised of workers and unemployed, the middle class, and those who had recently lost their middle-class status. It was a rebellion without leadership, either by established parties or by a newly emerged elite, a fact which formed part of the foundation of horizontalidad and other new organizing forms. It precipitated the birth of hundreds of neighborhood assemblies involving many tens of thousands of active participants.

People in neighborhood assemblies first met to try to discover new ways to support one another and meet their basic needs. Many explain the organization of the first assemblies as an encounter, as finding one another. People were in the streets, they began talking to one another, they saw the need to gather, and they did so, street corner by street corner, park by park. In many cases someone would write on a wall or street, 'neighbors, let’s meet Tuesday at 9 p.m.' and an assembly was begun."

Venezuela's Co-op Boom by Michael Fox - Yes! Magazine
To end poverty, put poor people in charge of their livelihood. A co-op boom turns the jobless into worker/owners.

"Manos Amigas is just one of the 8,000 cooperatives, or worker-collectives, formed by the nearly 300,000 graduates of the Vuelvan Caras cooperative job-training program since it began in 2004. It is also just one of the 181,000 cooperatives officially registered in Venezuela as of the end of last year—an astonishing figure that puts the South American nation at the top of the list of countries in the world with the most cooperatives.

Over 99 percent of Venezuela’s cooperatives have registered since President Hugo Chávez Frias took office in 1999. The cooperative boom is key to the shift by the Venezuelan government towards an economy based on the inclusion of traditionally excluded sectors of society and the promotion of alternative business models as part of its drive towards what Chávez calls 'socialism of the 21st century.'"

From Kropotkin's "Fields, Factories & Workshops" Conclusion:

"For centuries science and so-called practical wisdom have said to man: "It is good to be rich, to be able to satisfy, at least, your material needs; but the only means to be rich is to so train your mind and capacities as to be able to compel other men-slaves, serfs or wage-earners -to make these riches for you.

You have no choice.

Either you must stand in the ranks of the peasants and the artisans who, whatsoever economists and moralists may promise them in the future, are now periodically doomed to starve after each bad crop or during their strikes and to be shot down by their own sons the moment they lose patience.

Or you must: train your faculties so as to be a military commander of the masses, or to be accepted as one of the wheels of the governing machinery of the State or to become a manager of men in commerce or industry."  For many centuries there was no other choice, and men followed that advice, without finding in it happiness, either for themselves and their own children, or for those whom they pretended to preserve from worse misfortunes.

But modern knowledge has another issue to offer to thinking men. It tells them that in order to be rich they need not take the bread from the mouths of others; but that the more rational outcome would be a society in which men, with the work of their own hands and intelligence, and by the aid of the machinery already invented and to be invented, should themselves create all imaginable riches. Technics and science will not be lagging behind if production takes such a direction.

Guided by observation, analysis and experiment, they will answer all possible demands. They will reduce the time which is necessary for producing wealth to any desired amount, so as to leave to everyone as much leisure as he or she may ask for. They surely cannot guarantee happiness, because happiness depends as much, or even more, upon the individual himself as upon his surroundings.

But they guarantee, at least, the happiness that can be found in the full and varied exercise of the different capacities of the human being, in work that need not be overwork, and in the consciousness that one is not endeavouring to base his own happiness upon the misery of others.

These are the horizons which the above inquiry opens to the unprejudiced mind."

The Future from Latin America

Two articles in the Yes! magazine issue on cooperative activities in Argentina and Venezuela deserve highlighting, imo, and so here they are with an associated snippet.  I see cooperatives of these types as the only long-term and sustainable way out of the current political-economic-ecological messes we're increasingly finding ourselves.

The fact that worker-cooperatives can be successful as non-hierarchical or limited hierarchy systems certainly will spill over in a positive way into the local economy and political systems.  The Argentinian experiment is the more interesting of the two to me currently because there's no petro-economy to sponsor and support such activities.  They seem to be largely home-grown and spontaneous.  Maybe the anarchist writer Peter Kropotkin was right in his "The Conquest of Bread" (1906) and "Fields, Factories and Workshops" (1912) writings which I had come to view as being too utopian in nature.

Horizontalidad: Where Everyone Leads by Marina Sitrin
Argentina's workers took over factories, citizens took over the streets—no one seemed to miss having a boss.

"The popular rebellion of 2001 was comprised of workers and unemployed, the middle class, and those who had recently lost their middle-class status. It was a rebellion without leadership, either by established parties or by a newly emerged elite, a fact which formed part of the foundation of horizontalidad and other new organizing forms. It precipitated the birth of hundreds of neighborhood assemblies involving many tens of thousands of active participants.

People in neighborhood assemblies first met to try to discover new ways to support one another and meet their basic needs. Many explain the organization of the first assemblies as an encounter, as finding one another. People were in the streets, they began talking to one another, they saw the need to gather, and they did so, street corner by street corner, park by park. In many cases someone would write on a wall or street, 'neighbors, let’s meet Tuesday at 9 p.m.' and an assembly was begun."

Venezuela's Co-op Boom by Michael Fox - Yes! Magazine
To end poverty, put poor people in charge of their livelihood. A co-op boom turns the jobless into worker/owners.

"Manos Amigas is just one of the 8,000 cooperatives, or worker-collectives, formed by the nearly 300,000 graduates of the Vuelvan Caras cooperative job-training program since it began in 2004. It is also just one of the 181,000 cooperatives officially registered in Venezuela as of the end of last year—an astonishing figure that puts the South American nation at the top of the list of countries in the world with the most cooperatives.

Over 99 percent of Venezuela’s cooperatives have registered since President Hugo Chávez Frias took office in 1999. The cooperative boom is key to the shift by the Venezuelan government towards an economy based on the inclusion of traditionally excluded sectors of society and the promotion of alternative business models as part of its drive towards what Chávez calls 'socialism of the 21st century.'"

From Kropotkin's "Fields, Factories & Workshops" Conclusion:

"For centuries science and so-called practical wisdom have said to man: "It is good to be rich, to be able to satisfy, at least, your material needs; but the only means to be rich is to so train your mind and capacities as to be able to compel other men-slaves, serfs or wage-earners -to make these riches for you.

You have no choice.

Either you must stand in the ranks of the peasants and the artisans who, whatsoever economists and moralists may promise them in the future, are now periodically doomed to starve after each bad crop or during their strikes and to be shot down by their own sons the moment they lose patience.

Or you must: train your faculties so as to be a military commander of the masses, or to be accepted as one of the wheels of the governing machinery of the State or to become a manager of men in commerce or industry."  For many centuries there was no other choice, and men followed that advice, without finding in it happiness, either for themselves and their own children, or for those whom they pretended to preserve from worse misfortunes.

But modern knowledge has another issue to offer to thinking men. It tells them that in order to be rich they need not take the bread from the mouths of others; but that the more rational outcome would be a society in which men, with the work of their own hands and intelligence, and by the aid of the machinery already invented and to be invented, should themselves create all imaginable riches. Technics and science will not be lagging behind if production takes such a direction.

Guided by observation, analysis and experiment, they will answer all possible demands. They will reduce the time which is necessary for producing wealth to any desired amount, so as to leave to everyone as much leisure as he or she may ask for. They surely cannot guarantee happiness, because happiness depends as much, or even more, upon the individual himself as upon his surroundings.

But they guarantee, at least, the happiness that can be found in the full and varied exercise of the different capacities of the human being, in work that need not be overwork, and in the consciousness that one is not endeavouring to base his own happiness upon the misery of others.

These are the horizons which the above inquiry opens to the unprejudiced mind."