Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 April 4

= April 4 =

Free Books about the 1919 Paris Peace Conference Which Were Written by People Who Attended This Conference
Which books are there about the 1919 Paris Peace Conference which are available for free and which were written by people who personally attended this conference? For the record, I specifically want books which discuss how the various aspects of the post-WWI peace treaties (such as the post-WWI territorial changes, et cetera) were decided upon at this peace conference.


 * I know that French negotiator Andre Tardieu wrote a comprehensive book about the Versailles Treaty which is now available for free
 * (see here: http://books.google.com/books?id=kuAMAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+truth+about+the+treaty&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Pis-U-d2h5zYBfWbgcgC&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20truth%20about%20the%20treaty&f=false)
 * I also know that U.S. negotiators Edward Mandell House and Charles Seymour also wrote a comprehensive book about the post WWI-peace treaties
 * (see here: http://books.google.com/books?id=RuIMAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=what+really+happened+at+versailles&hl=en&sa=X&ei=AC0-U4vzL4nS2wX54IDIBA&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=what%20really%20happened%20at%20versailles&f=false)
 * In addition, then-U.S. Secretary of State (and a U.S. negotiator at Paris in 1919 as well) Robert Lansing appears to have written two books about the post-WWI peace as well
 * (see here: http://books.google.com/books?id=_J9nAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+big+four+and+others+at+the+peace+conference&hl=en&sa=X&ei=HjI-U-76C-rs2QX1gIHQDQ&ved=0CCsQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20big%20four%20and%20others%20at%20the%20peace%20conference&f=false and here: http://books.google.com/books?id=QssLAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA3&dq=the+peace+negotiations+a+personal+narrative&hl=en&sa=X&ei=NzI-U9r1LcnB2wXdq4DwAQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=the%20peace%20negotiations%20a%20personal%20narrative&f=false) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.96.94.194 (talk) 04:18, 4 April 2014 (UTC)

That said, which other books are there about this peace conference which were written by people who were personally at this conference and which are available for free? (For the record, such books do not necessarily have to describe the development of Treaty of Versailles; for instance, if these books only describe the development of another one or more of the post-WWI peace treaties, then that is totally fine as well.) Futurist110 (talk) 04:00, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Maybe not exactly or entirely on what you want, but by far the most famous and influential book about it by a delegate was of course John Maynard Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace, links to free text at our article.John Z (talk) 02:54, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I've heard about Keynes's book before. I don't know if it (completely) has what I am looking for here, but I will definitely check it out. Futurist110 (talk) 01:49, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Law: Licensing
I have never seen this kind of license. It just came to my mind accidentally. Let's say there are three persons:


 * X: the licensor of an intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark ...)
 * Y: the licensee
 * Z: a third party

Generally, there are three kinds of licenses:


 * Non-exclusive license: X may give anyone, such as Z, an additional license.
 * Sole license: Both X and Y are immune from legal actions. And X cannot give license to Z.
 * Exclusive license: Only Y is licensed. X is no longer licensed. X cannot give Z a license.

If X has already given non-exclusive licenses to parties Y1, Y2 and Y3. X also reserves the right not to renew Y1, Y2 and Y3's licenses.

Y4 comes to X to request for a license that bars X from giving additional licenses. X is also barred from renewing Y1, Y2 and Y3's licenses. X and Y4 entered the contract.

The contract may look like this:


 * 1) X grants Y4 certain rights.
 * 2) X agrees not to grant anyone else above-mentioned rights.
 * 3) X agrees not to renew Y1, Y2 and Y3's existing licenses.
 * 4) X agrees not to practice or blah-blah-blah above-mentioned rights. (optional)

I think this contract shall be enforceable. It is like a multiparty sole license. When all other licenses expire, the license will become a sole or exclusive licensing agreement depending on whether X is allowed to use the copyright or whatever IP ...

Does this kind of license have a name?

Is this license agreement enforceable in your country? -- Toytoy (talk) 12:45, 4 April 2014 (UTC)


 * "Complex"? "Exclusive license pending expiry of other licensing agreements"?  "License, becoming exclusive as of [date]"?  While the three types of license you have enumerated cover some broad, general categories, real-life licensing agreements often have a lot of little details that mix and match from the above categories and add bells and whistles, conditions, and sublicensing terms.
 * The particular rights and conditions are often rather arcane and subject-specific. For example, an author selling a short story may sign an agreement giving a publisher first print publication rights, exclusive print rights for a year (no other publisher can print the story in the first year), and non-exclusive anthology rights (the right to print the short story as part of a collection of works) for additional royalties. The same author selling a novel may sell a publisher exclusive print rights that remain in effect only as long as the book remains in print (a so-called 'reversion of rights' clause); this allows the author to find another publisher if the first publisher stops printing and selling his book.
 * In all cases, you should seek the advice of a qualified legal professional, in the appropriate jurisdiction, who has experience with intellectual property contracts in your specific area. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 13:13, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Note that Toytoy asked about "your country" without naming any country or any "you" in particular. This is a very poor way to get legal advice (why expect that "you" will be from the right jurisdiction?), so it looks to me as if it's simply a request for information.  Nyttend (talk) 01:57, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I have heard some very stupid contract limits in some countries. They do not allow certain contract clauses not because of political reasons (e.g., totalitarian regime), but because their law egg heads are living in their theoretical worlds. If they only have a legal hammer, they see everything as legal nails.


 * Take Taiwan's copyright licensing as an example. I was told if you grant an exclusive licence to someone. He or she automatically gets the right to sublicense the rights. It's because their mainstream legal scholars believe in some weird legal theories borrowed from Germany. They construct the law this way to adhere to their ivory tower world view.


 * In contrast, Taiwan's patent and trademark acts all allow freedom of contract.


 * I want to know if there are unnecessary, needless and weird contract restrictions in other countries. -- Toytoy (talk) 09:21, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

This question is fundamentally unanswerable. It confuses 3 (probably 4) types of intellectually property and then doesn't even begin to specify the jurisdiction, let alone the context. That said, in the copyright context in the U.S. there are specifically 3 types of general license types. It happens that way because two of them are specifically mentioned in the Act and the last one is implied. Those are an exclusive license, a transfer, and a non-exclusive license. The latter two require a signature (I think the technical term is a 'writing'), while the last does not. Outside of that, I don't know... and I hope this highlights how hopeless answering this questions as its phrased is. Shadowjams (talk) 07:46, 6 April 2014 (UTC)

Nurse's cap
What did nurse's caps look like back in 15th to 17th centuries? Did they resemble the nun's wimple? (Just use England, if it differs by country.) Also, in the 19th century, Jewish men wore these broad-brimmed black hats. So did Christian ministers. What was the reasoning for the Christian ministers to wear these broad-brimmed black hats that resemble the Orthodox Jewish hat? 140.254.227.76 (talk) 16:24, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
 * "Nurse" as a profession didn't really exist before the 19th Century. Women employed to look after invalids would have worn their normal clothing.  Nuns would have done a lot of that, and would have worn whatever habit and headpiece their order required.  Rojomoke (talk) 16:40, 4 April 2014 (UTC)


 * With regard to the clerical hat, are you referring to a cappello romano, or to something else? Deor (talk) 17:12, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Yes, that hat. 140.254.226.252 (talk) 17:45, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Well, I think that the answer to the question of why they were worn is simply that they were originally a fashionable form of headgear at a certain time and place, and then they became customary. Same goes for the Orthodox Jews. Deor (talk) 18:33, 4 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Nursing was performed by monks up to 1536 when the monasteries were dissolved in England. Sleigh (talk) 00:06, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * See History of nursing. Alansplodge (talk) 01:18, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
 * About the Jewish hats, are you talking about hats like these guys are wearing, or a black version of the Jewish hat, or something else? Nyttend (talk) 01:42, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

OK, since this is a clothing subject, I think I can answer this. According to our article Nurse uniform: "The first nurse uniforms were derived from the nun's habit.". And according to our other article Nurse's cap: --Mark Miller (talk) 01:52, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Women kidnapped to Saudi Harems?
This article claim that Women from Europe are kidnapped to Saudi Arabia, were they are placed in harems and never heard of again: I realize that this can simply be waved of as some sort of islamophobia, and I assume there are no confirmation. However, would this be impossible? As for myself, I do not know the truthfulness of the story, but: thinking of the reason to why this would not be possible, does it not sound more naive than the opposite? I do not know, but how much insight is there to the "harems" mentioned in the article, and how realistic is there that a woman taken there would simply be counted as a disappearance in her home country? If it does indeed happen, is there a reason to why this would be discovered at all? It it realistic that this can actually take place practically? Could it be true? Note that this is a serious question. --85.226.42.87 (talk) 23:09, 4 April 2014 (UTC)


 * It's possible. See North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens and North Korean abductions of South Koreans for some proven examples. StuRat (talk) 00:34, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * StuRat, North Korea is not Saudi Arabia - and vice versa. Your examples 'prove' precisely nothing. AndyTheGrump (talk) 00:41, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * How far is StuRat, North Korea from Pyongyang ? :-) StuRat (talk) 16:32, 6 April 2014 (UTC)


 * It proves that a nation can get away with kidnapping other nation's citizens for years, which is exactly what the Q is about. StuRat (talk) 03:45, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * We'd need to establish, first-off, whether Saudi Arabia would permit the existence of harems at all — small-scale polygany is permitted by Islamic law, and apparently it's not prohibited in Saudi Arabia, but there's a big difference between four-or-fewer wives and a harem. If harem-keeping is unlawful, this process would be harder yet to track, since all parts of it (and not just the woman-seizing in the first place) would be illegal.  Nyttend (talk) 02:25, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * What? No we don't. No country "permits" human trafficking. Your logic fails here only because it seems to assume a logical course that such behavior does not keep.--Mark Miller (talk) 02:45, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Kindly read what I said, because (1) I wasn't addressing whether the trafficking itself would be legal, and (2) lots of illegal things happen in every country. The initial question was "does it happen", not "can it happen legally", and I'm only mentioning legal issues to illustrate issues of answering the question.  Nyttend (talk) 02:53, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm still finding fault in the logic of whether or not a country legally permits harems as reasoning to whether they have them or not. The US doesn't allow them but we do seem to have television series' that depict it in both real and fictional situations. There are cases where there have been accusations of human trafficking to the country being listed above and investigations into the very situations this post brings up. There is simply no real logic to the presumption that a country that disallows something.....doesn't still have it happen in a huge way.--Mark Miller (talk) 01:29, 6 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Keeping a harem is fine according to Islamic law, as long as the women are slaves. A man can have sex with an unlimited number of slave girls in addition to up to four wives. Now Saudi Arabia abolished slavery in 1962, mostly due to international pressure, but that doesn't mean the attitude towards the practice suddenly changed. According to a report from the US Department of State in 2008 (source):
 * "The Government of Saudi Arabia does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking and is not making significant efforts to do so. The government continues to lack adequate anti-trafficking laws, and, despite evidence of widespread trafficking abuses, did not report any criminal prosecutions, convictions, or prison sentences for trafficking crimes committed against foreign domestic workers. The government similarly did not take law enforcement action against trafficking for commercial sexual exploitation in Saudi Arabia, or take any steps to provide victims of sex trafficking with protection. "
 * Of course it seems unlikely that the Saudi government itself is involved in kidnapping European women, but at least it doesn't seem very interested to prevent such practices. - Lindert (talk) 09:36, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * While I don't disagree that the Saudi government may not do enough, the part you quoted seem to primarily refer to commercial sexual explotation and sexual abuse of foreign domestic workers. While these are obviously horrific (although also happen to some extent in many countries with greater or lesser law enforcement and for those and other reasons, success) and related, they don't seem to be the same thing as harems the OP referred to.
 * Even in the case of domestic workers, it seems likely most of these are domestic workers who are sexually abused rather than primarily kept to be a part of a harem. (Again I'm not saying this makes the cases less horrific, simply different.)
 * So while I'm sure there are some harems or whatever you want to call them with kidnapped women (actually I expect they exist in many countries where the population is large enough that you can resonably expect to find them although the frequency is obviously going to vary) this doesn't really suggest they are a significant problem.
 * I expect rather than pure kidnappings the far bigger problem would be those who went there willingly, probably even entered in to the relationship or whatever you want to call it willingly but now find it difficult to leave and perhaps are forced to do things they never expected and don't consent to, e.g. as mentioned here [//books.google.co.nz/books?id=eqHkaI5I1t8C&lpg=PA151&ots=YdjPRXH1wv&dq=harem%20european&pg=PA151#v=onepage&q=harem%20european] (the book is I think from 1991 but the parts I read still seem relevant).
 * This is after all similar to what happens with domestic workers and manual labourers. Most of these aren't slaves per se and were not kidnapped or born in to it, but their conditions are not always that far from it. (Although I expect many of the women who are part of harems, at least the "Western" women are often better educated.)
 * Nil Einne (talk) 15:22, 5 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't doubt that terrible things happen in Saudi Arabia, even more so than in the U.S. But the original source doesn't pass the sniff test.  It contains typos that I think of as "native" rather than "foreign", i.e. "boarder" and "allot".  Besides, the whole premise is peculiar: female circumcision is a custom meant primarily to control otherwise somewhat free women... what's the point of doing it to one locked up whose first priority is escape rather than sex?  Copies occur only on the most remote sites.  I'm calling hoax. Wnt (talk) 12:07, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

I haven't clicked on the link, and probably won't, but here are some relevant facts in response to the above thread: 1) From all indications, female genital mutilation is not any regular Saudi custom. It seems to be commonly practiced only in a few small areas outside of Africa (excluding recent migrants from Africa), not including Saudi Arabia.  2) There have been a number of stories in the media about cases of women treated atrociously in Saudi Arabia, but in the vast majority of cases the women were Saudi nationals, or entered the country voluntarily as foreign domestic workers, or as wives of Saudi men. In some respects Saudi Arabia is a very strange place, and a number of sleazy things go on there, but I haven't seen any particular evidence that it's a large-scale haven of old-style "white slavery", as they used to call it 75 years ago... 3) There was a notorious high-profile case of beauty queen Shannon Marketic and a close relative of the Sultan of Brunei (who claimed sovereign immunity to avoid being sued). Saudi Arabia was not involved. AnonMoos (talk) 02:15, 6 April 2014 (UTC)