I own a lot of copyrights, and here are the benefits that I derive ....

Logo of US Copyright Office

During my academic career I would write scholarly articles from time to time and see them published in the periodical literature devoted to such work. I was rarely paid in money, but the gratification of seeing my work in print, and of contributing to the scholarly conversation was more than enough compensation.

But there was an additional, legal gratification: absent an explicit contract to the contrary, copyright remains with the writer. So now I own quite a few copyrights, and here are the benefits that I derive from them:

In this age of computerization, not a few of my old articles are available in the data bases of a number of well-known publishers. So I can find much of my old work there any time I want to refer to it. I can find it there, but as I learned to my chagrin, it is generally not free. Since I never gave permission for my work to be sold by others, I approached a number of these publishers. Look, I said, this work is mine. You sell it without my permission. Tell you what, I said to a number of them, I will give you permission to keep using my work if, by way of compensation, you will give me free access to your data base.

In not a single case have any of these publishers -- a very famous university press among them -- agreed to my proposal. I generally get a letter back saying that the matter is being referred to their legal department, or whatever, and then I never hear from them again.

The one exception is the well-known conservative magazine Commentary, to which I contributed a few very minor items more than fifty years ago, back when it was not at all conservative. This is what I wrote on October 2 of last year:

Some fifty years ago I contributed some book reviews to Commentary. Whatever the custom may be now, at that time I retained the copyright to this material, since, absent an explicit contract to the contrary, the copyright automatically belongs to the author. Now it appears that you sell access to these reviews on your website, even though these rights are not yours to sell. I was asked to pay for access to my own property !

I am willing to negotiate an arrangement under which I would grant you rights to sell access to my work in return for my having free usage of your archives.

In any case, please note that, as of now, you are infringing on my intellectual property rights.

Kindest regards, and best wishes for the new year.

Well, it did not take long to get an answer from the good people of Commentary. Here is what they wrote back, on October 5:

Dear Werner Cohn:

I apologize for any misunderstanding. We will remove your work from our website as soon as possible.

I hope you have a sweet new year.

Well, I can't say that I was happy with this answer, but at least, I thought, they are doing the right thing: they know they are infringing on my property rights, and they agree to cease and desist, in full compliance with their own (current) private-property principles.

But there is a funny ending to this story. They have indeed removed my name from an old book review of mine, but the review itself is still there, published as "Reviewed by [blank]." No, I am not making this up. Click here.

UPDATE, about three hours later from the above:
Whoever says that Commentary has no shame is wrong, completely wrong. After I posted the above, and sent a link to Mr. John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine, lo and behold, a couple of hours later, two of my ancient book reviews have disappeared from the on-line archive of the magazine. And all that happened on shabat. Great work, John P. !

The Salary Scandal in Jewish Philanthropy

This is an old story, and bringing it up once again, by an obscure blogger like me, is not likely to cure the problem. But please ... why are these gentlemen (mainly) of the "Jewish civil service" paid as they are ?

In the chart above, I've pulled out salaries in excess of $500,000 in the world of Jewish philanthropy (see the excellent site of the Chronicle of Philanthropy), but this is just a tip of the iceberg of excessive payments to Big Shots, Jewish and otherwise. No more than one half of one percent of the American workforce receives this much (oops, I almost said "earns this much"). Ordinary people like you and me earn far, far less. We are regularly asked to contribute to groups like UJA-Federation, in the name of helping the less fortunate. Is there any rhyme or reason, or any decency whatsoever, in using our contributions to support the lifestyles of the upper one half of one percent ? There is not.

The apologists of such salaries invariably say that it is not possible to get "good people" to work for less. The same argument was advanced on behalf of the salaries and bonuses paid to the "good people" whose incompetence gave us the current recession.

Can you get "good people" to work for non-stratospheric salaries ? The President of the United States ($400,000), the federal judges ($170,000), officials of the Salvation Army ($216,000), Jesuit priests who lead major universities (room and board), all these seem willing enough to work for reasonable incomes. Moreover, scholars who have looked for empirical evidence to support stratospheric incomes have found none: there is simply no evidence that such salaries "are needed."

As it happens, the highest salary at the Salvation Army is $216,000. That is one fifth of the salary paid to the president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles. On the other hand, the yearly income of the Salvation Army is $3,237,768,000, which happens to be fifty times as much as that of the Jewish Federation of LA. In other words, Sally Anne gets 250 times more value for her money than does the Jewish Federation of LA.

No, there is no valid argument "from necessity" for the high salaries at Jewish institutions. But in any case, whatever pragmatic reasons could be found or invented to justify such payments, the most important thing about these payments, in my view, is that they are unseemly.

Finally, I must hasten to add that certain payments to officials of elite universities are still more shocking than these abuses at Jewish groups. Please study the Chronicle of Philanthropy materials to which I have linked above.

Stalin, Robeson, and Me

Fifty-seven years ago this month Joseph Stalin died in Moscow, on March 5, 1953. I was a sociology graduate student, aged 26, just recently married, not yet a father (though expecting). Those Stalinists in New York, whom I had encountered at CCNY and elsewhere, were of professional interest to me (as were Jehovah's Witnesses, the Plymouth Brethren, etc. etc.). How would the Stalinists react to the death of their "great leader" ? I decided to make some observations.

By coincidence, a large public meeting had previously been planned by one of the Communist front organizations to take place on what turned out to be a day or two after Stalin's death. The venue was a large hall in Harlem, and Paul Robeson (whom the Communists had not yet revealed as a secret party member) was the scheduled speaker. I decided to attend. Would there be tears for the newly-late leader ? Would there be great public grief ? I wanted to know and I went up to Harlem to find out.

What a surprise ! The comrades arrived on time, maybe a couple of thousand, and sat politely through routine speeches without there being a single mention of Stalin. Finally Paul Robeson got up, and in the first sentence of his speech declaimed the death of "the great Stalin." Well, at that moment there was loud applause, a standing applause, but applause no different from that accompanying other points that the various CP speakers had emphasized.

I concluded that these New York Stalinists were devoted to their party and its discipline, but that they lacked any warm emotional tie to the man whom they had seen praised, so many times, in the Daily Worker and elsewhere, as Coryphaeus of Science, Father of Nations, Brilliant Genius of Humanity, Great Architect of Communism, Gardener of Human Happiness. The cult of personality, I concluded, was thin and arid, at least among the New York comrades.

The Name Changers

ricodebuco.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/two-faced/

No no no. This picture, designed by Rico de Buco, does not at all represent my view of people who have changed their names, say from an ancestral "Cohn" to a less incriminating "Collins." The sentiment suggested by the picture is an exaggeration of my views, at best. But, for what it's worth, here is my article on the subject, now more than twenty-five years old.

Child slaves in Haiti: The Restaveks

The institution of "restavek" (from the French "reste avec," 'stay with') in Haiti, in which hundreds of thousands of poor children are given into a form of slavery, is no secret whatsoever. Every Haitian is well acquainted with it, books have been written about it ... and yet, there seems to be no international concern.

For those who would like to learn more, there is the book by Jean-Robert Cadet, himself a former restavek, and the Restavek Foundation he has founded.

Take a look at the CNN video:

Are some people good, others bad ?

People aren't either good or bad. It's circumstances that differ: some are more fortunate, more educated, richer or healthier, etc. etc., than others. Do not make value judgement. Do not be moralistic.

That is the doctrine of the college-educated. But in real life all people speak of "nice guys," of "absolute jerks," etc.

What to make of it ? Here are my answers, or at least my reflections:

Bad Character, Good character

Who are the Jews ? What do they do ?

Photo by Werner Cohn

"Jews are a famously accomplished group. They make up 0.2 percent of the world population, but 54 percent of the world chess champions, 27 percent of the Nobel physics laureates and 31 percent of the medicine laureates.

Jews make up 2 percent of the U.S. population, but 21 percent of the Ivy League student bodies, 26 percent of the Kennedy Center honorees, 37 percent of the Academy Award-winning directors, 38 percent of those on a recent Business Week list of leading philanthropists, 51 percent of the Pulitzer Prize winners for nonfiction." -- David Brooks, NY Times, Jan. 11, 2010