Hold On A Minute, Comrade

An internet archive of radical writings was sued by Lawrence & Wishart, a small, leftist publisher, which asserted copyright ownership over the English-language edition of Karl Marx’s and Friederich Engels’s writings, some of which appeared on the archive. The deadline for removing the writings was May 1, International Worker’s Day, a fact that was not lost on the archive’s supporters. An online petition with more than 4,500 signatures noted that the two economists “wrote against the monopoly of capitalism and its origin, private property.” Lawrence & Wishart countered that its critics reflected a “consumer culture which expects cultural content to be delivered free to consumers, leaving cultural workers such as publishers, editors and writers unpaid.”