HORACIO POTEL interview to BEATRIZ BUSANICHE
Two years ago Argentinian philosophy professor Horacio Potel was taken to court for running three non-profit online Spanish libraries featuring hitherto unavailable texts by Heidegger, Derrida and Nietzsche. He talks to Beatriz Busaniche about his country’s draconian copyright laws and the vital importance of free access to our common heritage.
Beatriz Busaniche: When did you start uploading the philosophical texts and why?
Horacio Potel: Over ten years ago on 22 December 1999, Nietzsche was born in Spanish – in our times of ultra high-speed change, this is the equivalent of a entire generation. There was no broadband or blogs in those days, no Facebook and no Google, but for the first time I had instant access to all this information and and all free! But in those days there was little or nothing about philosophy on the Internet. And even less about Nietzsche, whom I was fascinated by at the time. So I decided to contribute to the construction of this network and compile a selection of Nietzsche’s texts in Spanish, because almost everything was in English back then. According to Altavista (the Google of the day) there were only 15 Spanish texts on and by Nietzsche. On the night my first Nietzsche site, “Nietzscheana”, went online, the number of his texts available online in Spanish doubled.
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