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Open Letter to Desclée de Brouwer

Sillery, Thursday June 9th, 2005.

Desclée de Brouwer
76 bis, rue des Saints-Pères
75007 Paris
FRANCE
Téléphone : 01 45 49 61 92
Télécopieur : 01 42 22 61 41
Courriel : direction (at sign) descleedebrouwer.com

Subject: IP for the works of F.-J. Thonnard

Good day,

Desclée de Brouwer published the following works by François-Joseph Thonnard a few years ago:

Thonnard, F.-J. Précis de philosophie, Paris, Desclée, 1950.
Thonnard, F.-J. Précis d'histoire de philosophie, Paris, Desclée, 1966.
Thonnard, F.-J. Extraits des grands philosophes, Paris, Desclée, 1937.

I've already sent you several requests concerning this:

- an e-mail on February 5, 2004.
- an e-mail on May 5, 2004.
- a registered letter on July 7, 2004.
- an e-mail on June 9, 2005, to send this Open Letter, and to notify you of its presence on my web site.

So far, the only anwswers I've obtained were a notice of receipt of my registered letter (202 kb, JPG file), and a short e-mail:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: DIRECTION [mailto:direction@descleedebrouwer.com]
>> Sent: May 6, 2004 8:57 AM
>> To: Stefan Jetchick
>> Subject: Re: Demande de permission de mettre les oeuvres de F.-J.
>> Thonnard dans le domaine public
>>
>> Cher Monsieur,
>> Nous accusons réception de votre mail, que nous avons fait parvenir à la
>> personne en charge des droits de reproduction et qui vous donnera très
>> rapidement une réponse.
>> En vous priant de bien vouloir nous excuser pour ce retard, veuillez
>> recevoir nos sincères salutations,
>>
>> P/O le service littéraire des Editions Desclée de Brouwer

Please note once more that personally, I don't want anybody's IP! I'd much rather have Desclée de Brouwer simply reprint Thonnard. My problem would be solved! (Especially if it was also offered in English).

Another solution would be to find a better Philosophy manual, but so far Thonnard is "the least bad" I've found (no manual is perfect, of course).

My last resort is to digitize Thonnard and to put it on the Internet, but for this I need to avoid stealing other people's IP! Hence my many efforts to contact you.

I therefore ask you again, Please (and almost on my knees!), and this time not only by e-mail but also by posting this letter on my website, if you grant me permission to digitize the works of Thonnard (listed here above), and to put them in the public domain on the Internet.

If the only thing preventing you to reprint these books is lack of time and money, I can probably find people who will digitize those books for free, as long as you promise to offer those works in bookstores fairly quickly.

Ideally, you would donate Thonnard's IP to the "OSThoPhiT" project (of course, at the condition that nobody would make any money with Thonnard! We don't want to rob you!).

Thank you very much!

Stefan Jetchick

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