Government Sale of Kaczynski Papers

Submitted by Blake on January 25, 2007 - 7:36am
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everhoef writes "Monday's NYTimes reported: "Nine years after he began serving a life sentence for the Unabomber crimes, Theodore J. Kaczynski is fighting to reclaim more than 40,000 pages of his writings and correspondence so he can preserve them in their rawest form for the public to read....The government wants to auction sanitized versions of the materials on the Internet to raise money for four of Mr. Kaczynski's victims."

Comments

Submitted by birdie on January 25, 2007 - 3:54pm.

My husband (lawyer) thinks Kaczynski is entitled to protect his documents from being edited, etc. I think the guy has no rights in regard to what he's written as a convicted criminal. What do you all think?

Submitted by mdoneil on January 25, 2007 - 6:30pm.

When one is convicted ot a felony they lose certain rights. Some places you lose the right to vote, the right to be free, the right to own guns, and the like. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately you don't lose the right to copyright your works. I think that is as it should be. While I can't think of any convicted felon authors I would bother to read there must be some.

As to the nutjob in question, who the hell would want to read his nonsense. Let him have it back, but good luck finding a publisher now that Judith Reagan is unemployed.

Submitted by everhoef on January 27, 2007 - 3:50am.

I guess it didn't even occur to me that K. shouldn't retain copyright on his papers. I think it's pretty bad that the government wants to confiscate his right to his papers... but I think it's HORRIFYING that the government intends to AUCTION them off. (As well as compromising the content and organization which gives a researcher an awful lot of insight into how a person thinks...) I think auctioning them would perpetuate and glorify the the acts of violence by turning it into a commodity.
Over and over again, we're being sold murder.

And as for: who would want to look at them or of what use are they? Aberrant and violent acts/tendencies do not disappear when perpetrators get locked up. I would think there would be philosophers and sociologists out there who would really appreciate a chance to study these records.

It seems that the suggested auction is an attempt at an additional punishment... idea-ownership punishment. It's true that it would ensure the fact that K. had no say in what happened to his writings. In that sense, I guess it's a punishment. But on the other hand, it would also further iconize him and give "value" to his work in the eyes of "murder memorabilia" collectors.