I’ve spent the last month working an internship in the Tuskegee University archives, mostly on an audio digitization project. We are working our way through a hoard of amazing reel-to-reel tapes from the history of the Institute and the local Freedom Movement in Tuskegee. Last week, I’m proud to say, we made our first major release: never-before-published audio recordings of historic 1957 and 1959 mass meetings of the Tuskegee Civic Association during the Tuskegee Boycott/Crusade for Citizenship, and a 1966 appearance by Muhammad Ali and Minister John Shabazz on the Tuskegee Institute campus. In the first of these recordings, you can hear newly released speeches by K. L. Buford, Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph David Abernathy, and Martin Luther King Jr. at a critical moment in the Alabama Movement, which have not been heard again since they were first made 60 years ago:

This audio recording preserves a historic July 2, 1957 mass meeting called by the Tuskegee Civic Association (TCA) in the second month of the Tuskegee Boycott and Crusade for Citizenship. The main program includes a message from K. L. Buford, a local minister and activist in Tuskegee, and speeches of support by Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph David Abernathy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Devotions are delivered by E.G. Braxter, reports and remarks by C.G. Gomillion, President of the TCA, and the Financial Appeal by S. T. Martin. TCA called a mass meeting in response to Senate Bill 291, a bill sponsored by Macon County state senator and White Citizens’ Council leader Sam Engelhardt. SB 291 dramatically redrew the Tuskegee city limits, in order to gerrymander all but 5 registered black voters out of the city. At the moment of crisis, these historic speeches urged the community to “get in it,” and called for endurance and unity in the struggles to overturn SB 291 and to end second-class citizenship in Macon County. [press announcement]

• For a timeline overview of the first two years of the Tuskegee Crusade for Citizenship by Institute historian and Tuskegee civil rights activist Frank J. Toland, and a passionate speech in support of the movement by the Jackie Robinson (yeah, that Jackie Robinson), see our recording from TCA Meeting #103 (June 23, 1959).

• For our TCA Meetings, Speeches and Materials Collection, which will be growing as we continue to digitize the hundreds of meeting tapes in our archives, see the archives TCA Collection webpage.

• Here’s our full press announcement.

Here’s a recent story from the Washington Post, informing us that More students are illegally downloading college textbooks for free.

It's hard (if not impossible) to know just how prevalent this practice is, but some college students around the country are uploading their expensive college textbooks onto the Internet so other students can download them for free and avoid the hefty fees that are sometimes more than $200 a book.

Vocativ.com has a story titled "Why College Students are Stealing Their Textbooks," which notes that some students are even downloading them for ethics classes.

The cost to students of college textbooks skyrocketed 82 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a 2013 report by the U.S. General Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress. As a result, students have been looking for less expensive options, such as renting books — and, now, finding them on the Internet, uploaded by other students.

In August, an organization called the Book Industry Study Group, which represents publishers, retailers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, librarians and others in the industry, released a survey of some 1,600 students and found, according to a release on the data, that "students continue to become more sophisticated in acquiring their course materials at the lowest cost as illicit and alternative acquisition behaviors, from scanned copies to illegal downloads to the use of pirated websites, continue to increase in frequency."

–Valerie Strauss, More students are illegally downloading college textbooks for free
Washington Post, 17 September 2014.

Well, good. The textbook industry is an obscene racket, predicated on extraordinary costs and a maze of perverse incentives, controlled by a tightly organized cartel of copyright-monopolists, gargantuan institutional sellers and gargantuan institutional buyers, throwing every ton of their incredible weight onto the shoulders of students, tollgating and massively hampering the dissemination of knowledge.

Pirating textbooks isn’t just a good idea. It’s a mitzvah. Burn the domming industry to the ground. Knowledge can and should be free.

See also.

• GT 2012-01-30: Burn the textbook
• GT 2008-05-28: How Intellectual Protectionism promotes the progress of science and the useful arts
• GT 2009-02-07: Counter-Economic optimism
• Aaron Swartz (July 2008): Guerrilla Open-Access Manifesto

This week in coding: the ethos of Intellectual Property forces smart people to waste an incredible amount of time and effort dealing with trivial, unproductive bullshit.

Fun fact: So under the current copyright law, almost all books held under copyright by their original authors stay under copyright for the entire life of the author, plus 70 additional years after the death of the author. For works of corporate authorship, the company that owns the copyright holds it for either 95 years from the date of first publication or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever expires first. To put that in perspective, Paul Avrich’s books on the Russian Anarchists (published in 1967) Voltairine de Cleyre (published in 1978) will become available in the public domain in 2,076 CE — just over 10 years after the invention of warp drive and First Contact with the Vulcans.^[1] But at least we’ll be prepared, because the first episode of Star Trek will have finally come out of monopoly a few years before, in September 2061.^[2]

Abolish Intellectual Protectionism.

See also.

• GT 2008-05-28: How Intellectual Protectionism promotes the progress of science and the useful arts

1. ^[1]N.B.: Or, you can pirate a copy of The Russian Anarchists from Libcom now.↩
2. ^[2]Assuming that large media companies make no efforts before 2061 to extend corporate copyright terms even further. Which they almost certainly will.↩