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European Court Rules for American Scholar in Freedom-of-Expression Case

October 28, 2011, 2:18 pm

A professor at Clark University, in Worcester, Mass., has won a judgment in the European Court of Human Rights that a controversial provision of Turkey’s penal code that criminalizes “denigrating Turkishness” violates freedom of expression. The scholar, Taner Akçam, brought the case in 2007 after criminal complaints were filed against him in Turkey for an article he had written in 2006 criticizing the prosecution of a journalist who had been charged under the provision and who was later killed by extremists.

Mr. Akçam’s academic work has focused on the killing of as many as 1.5 million Armenians during the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, which modern Turkish governments have refused to characterize as genocide, and he now holds what Clark University describes as “the only endowed chair in the world dedicated to research and teaching on the subject of the Armenian genocide.”

“Affirming the Armenian issue as ‘genocide’ is considered by some (especially extremist or ultranationalist groups) as a denigration of ‘Turkishness,’” the court noted, and academics and journalists have been among the most prominent targets of the penal-code provision.

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  • d_fevens

    And the university will also create a way to publicize information about
    the orphans so their owners can have the chance to claim them.

    The work of finding copyright owners should have occurred before Google and its library partners copied the volumes in the first place. Their failure to do so shows their lack of respect for the intellectual property of others.

    Douglas Fevens,
    Halifax, Nova Scotia
    The University of Wisconsin, Google, & Me

  • mbelvadi

     If a person dies without any heirs at all, what happens to their property? Does it become owned by the state in which they last lived? If so, would that mean that various state governments might be the copyright holders of many of these works?

  • iporter

    Frankly, d_fevens, “respect for the intellectual property of others” doesn’t mean treating it like kryptonite, such that we never touch it. Furthermore, given your statement, it appears that you subscribe to a rigid notion of intellectual property that makes it more akin to a car than an idea. Although it is a well-worn argument, that the spirit of US copyright law was (and arguably still is) focused on the common good, not individual IP owners, remains important to reiterate. We aren’t supposed to completely ignore an owner’s IP until they give us the magic key to unlock the wonders of his or her ideas. In a sense, following copyright law, the American public has at least a small stake (dare I say part ownership) in any individual’s IP. Finally, I think it’s time we eschew the baggage of Enlightenment notions of authorship, because the image of the individual genius in the dimly lit room conjuring his (and it always is a “him”) great ideas is fictional.

  • commentarius

    Fevens awakes every morning to look for any article about Google Books to which he can mourn his wounded psyche.  Heavens, somebody scanned his obscure book without his permission (which he wouldn’t have given in any case).  And now this victim-hero can shake his fist at the sky and curse the tides for the rest of his days.   Surely there is something better to do with one’s time in Halifax, Nova Scotia?  Or maybe not.

  • d_fevens

    When the University of Wisconsin and Google made copies of my work, they did not use my ideas which the book contains, they copied it as a whole work & commercialized that whole work on the world wide web.

  • robert_wyatt

     I think you mean “Fevens awakes every morning to Google for any article about Google Books”

  • d_fevens

     Actually I Yahoo.  Google has been removed from my toolbar.

  • delonix

     I believe Google commercialized its access, not the work or ideas. 

  • http://twitter.com/dwythe Deb Wythe

    Hats’ off to Melissa and her team! I’m always happy to see people who aren’t paralyzed by the uncertainty inherent in things like orphaned works. There’s a lot we can do that’s low risk and high reward for the community.

  • lawman

    This decision by the Court is obviously Israel’s fault!

  • 609zr

    http://avpv.tripod.com/AmericanVictims.html

    Mr. Taner Akçam is a very brave man.  While the pursuit of multiculturalism is romantic in thought, it is suicidal in practice.  Friends and acquaintances from around the world are a beautiful experience but, the global village is an academic’s naive failure to recognize and let be the wonderful differences between us.    

  • http://twitter.com/DwayneHouston2 Dwayne Houston

     I’m sorry but I think the emphasis for a liberal arts education should NOT be a priority at community college.  Most students that attend community college just want to get their degree, so they can go on and get their jobs.  Do we really need a welder who is well-versed in Shakespeare or a licensed truck driver who can quote Satre? 

    Every associates degree, just like a Bachelor’s, has a certain number of liberal art credits required.  I’m not denying the importance of a liberal arts background, but I believe it should be kept to a minimum.  Again, these are classes the students don’t want and aren’t immediately applicable to their goals.  Yes, we want a more educated populace, but we run the risk of turning people off to completing their degrees by adding more liberal arts requirements. 

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