The American Anthropological Association Treats Copyright as Optional *Updated Twice*

Probably not for their own publications, but in their latest blog post, they openly encourage the sharing of .pdfs and posting of the text from an entire article for those without a subscription to Harper's to read without paying for it.

Here is the post:

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Journalist Describes Experience with a Human Terrain Team

Wired's Danger Room blog pointed to an article in Harper's Magazine about the Human Terrain System. For those without a Harper's subscription or who have yet to receive a pdf of the article, you can read it *here*. Feel free to post your thoughts below.

I took out the link to the blog that was violating the copyright. They not only link to a blog that has obviously reprinted an entire article that is available by subscription only, but they suggest that there has been a lot of sharing of .pdfs of this article (instead of purchasing it). This is not even being done out of ignorance. It's not like they just linked to some on-line article, they *know* its a subscription only article, yet they encourage this theft anyway.

I subscribe to Harper's. I think it is the best magazine out there. I am very angry that the AAA is making this very easy for those who want to steal the article instead of purchasing the magazine. If anthropologists are so obsessed with HTT, buy the friggin' magazine already!

However, the article was written by a journalist who actually spent an entire month with an HTT in Afghanistan and wrote about what they did. He didn't write about THE CONTROVERSY, which some people feel is a biased approach. So maybe some anthropologists would not like to purchase a magazine that does not print their name and reference the book they are writing/have written about anthropology an the military. Here are some posts from the Danger Room to this effect:

I read Featerstone's article and was unimpressed, mostly because it was old news (why did such a straight forward piece take so long to come out?), it ignored all the criticisms of Human Terrain, and he only spent a few days with the teams. Can this really be the most in depth story out there? Given all the controversies surrounding Human Terrain it was very odd to read this piece without any discussion at all about the problems that professional anthropologists and other have with it.

The author responded:

PbR - I was with the team for one month, not a few days. Not sure where you're getting that timeline. As for the criticisms of the HTS, it really wasn't in the scope of my article. Rather, my goal was to show what, exactly, an HTT does from first-hand experience. That hasn't been done yet. Furthermore, I tried to put the HTS in a broader context (controversies you refer to are a narrower context), to explain how it is both an improvement on old 'kinetic' ways of waging war and a sign of increasingly militarized foreign policy. But maybe that didn't interest you. Personally, I'm interested in the 'controversies' surrounding the program, and I've read everything on the subject, but I feel much of that controversy is manufactured, and it's been covered in great detail by other media.

Another comment:

Strange to see a reporter claim that the Human Terrain controversy was "manufactured" when this article's onesided reporting so ignored the controversy that it manufactures the existence of Human Terrain Teams without controversy.

Another response:

Travis -- when I say the controversy is manufactured I mean that the media manufactures it, not critics of the program. The criticisms that have been levied against the program by some anthropologists are debated in lots of places, but no one has actually written about what an HTT does and how they do it, and more to the point, what it all means in the broadest sense -- not what it means to the academic community, which is rather narrow. I never said, here or anywhere, that the criticisms of HTS are without merit.

I'm curious, how was my reporting 'one sided'? If you read the article with any degree of care or depth of thought, you'll note that Afghan citizens actually get more quotes and space devoted to their views than the HTT.

I responded:

Steve, I was bracing myself to read another HTT article that quoted the same handful of anthropologists criticizing the program without a clue about what they are actually doing. Thank you for finally producing some straightforward reporting about HTTs in action (last year) that ignores the AAA noismakers. Thank you also for highlighting the change in international aid that is, for better or worse (mostly worse), shifting to the military. I think that is the key policy change that has caused the need for HTT.

Then I added this:

By the way, the link with the entire article is a copyright violation. I think you should remove that link, although the AAA has already re-broadcast it. Ethics schmethics.

I also sent Harper's an email.

I assume that posting an entire article from Harper's on a blog is a copyright violation.

You might also want to point out to the American Anthropological Association that they should not be encouraging copyright violations.

-- Signed, a subscriber who would like others to subscribe to/purchase Harper's instead of stealing it

The Harper's rep thanked me and posted a comment on the original blog (which I'm not going to link):

This article is copyright Harper's Magazine, a non-profit corporation that survives on subscriptions. You do not have the right to reproduce this article in full on your website. I can't find an email address to which I can send a more formal cease-and-desist, but hopefully this will do the job--please remove it from your site without delay. You can follow up to webmaster@harpers.org if you have any questions.

The links are all still there on the Wired blog and the AAA blog. So I added this comment:

I'm thinking about setting up a blog called "Anthropology Texts" in which I post the entire text of articles I find in Anthropology News, American Anthropologist, etc. Would that be OK? Would you encourage other blogs to link to it instead of bothering to subscribe to AnthroSource? It would probably save libraries around the world some money.

And I twittered this:

qualintitative is considering listing the AAA under the heading "Memberships in Unprofessional Organizations" on my CV.

This has been another edition of, "Me being embarrassed by my profession." Join us next time...


*UPDATE* The post is no longer there. *POOF* It's gone. Instead of fixing the post and apologizing, they just made it disappear, like it never happened. How many rules of blogging can they break in one post? How about all of those .pdfs of this article floating around? It sure sounded like the author of that post had received an illegal copy or had witnessed the distribution of illegal copies.

Great job AAA.

**UPDATE** That other website took off the article.