Megan West(erby)

[The cease and desist order] may have been written in good faith, but it is wrong. Howard Zinn authorized the publication and display of the work on our website.

However, we realize we are making our case to both the general public as well as to a legal department at Harper Collins who may decide to take us to court and bully us into submission, so we are willing to make two offers.

The first offer is to place a link to purchase the book. We have no interest in any sort of “profit sharing” scheme that companies like Amazon offer to websites that link to them, we will continue to not make a cent off this venture. We’re not here to make money, we’re here to make change.

The second offer is less rational, but we can’t help ourselves. Some of us got a chance to meet Howard and have dinner with him and he was about as incredibly sweet and decent a person as we have met. We would do nothing to harm him or his family and if either his daugher or son ask us to remove the book, we will. We understand the royalties for the book are probably getting socked away to pay for his grandkids’ or great-grandkids’ college tuition, and we honestly believe that a community that enthusiastically promotes Howard Zinn is better than one that doesn’t, for royalties and otherwise, but we will respect their wishes. (As an aside to Myla and Jeff, we swear that every word of this is true and that your father gave us permission beforehand and later told us he thought the whole thing was fantastic).

We love A People’s History of the United States and we love Howard Zinn. We think it possesses something few books ever contain: the potential to re-wire how people think of their government, their history, their relationship to democracy, and their own political agency. And from many conversations and emails, this potential continues to be realized over and over again, every day. Before it, the stories of coal miners resisting and slaves rebelling were relegated to folk songs or hidden away in some history classes taught in some places. Now a people’s history can be found everywhere, from online to #169 on Amazon. We want it get out there even more and that’s why we put it up and have promoted it so much. We want people to read the book.

History Is A Weapon’s response to the cease and desist order from HarperCollins concerning A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Object lesson if you’re an agency: do your research and pick your battles.

Object lesson if you’re everyone else: fight against the paper-pushing agencies filing blindly and holding onto outdated and publisher/label/backer-controlled notions of IP and content distribution. 

18 October 2010 ·