From: Fred Camper (email suppressed)
Date: Sun Jun 28 2009 - 09:36:12 PDT
I agree with Chuck. FrameWorks provides a good mirror of current
attitudes in the avant-garde film community. This is one reason I'm
still here, despite occasional frustrations. And I'm pleased to have
some of my posts cited in a book -- "no press is bad press" and all
that. One assumes that a university press would have understood that
such posts are the copyrighted property of the author, and limited
quotations from posts according to some reasonable view of what
constitutes "fair use." At the same time, one posts to FrameWorks
hoping to have one's posts read, not hoping to make money.
On a recent trip to Brazil to show Brakhage films (in good prints), I
found that a number of the people who attended had first been exposed
to Brakhage via Internet bootlegs, and were now pleased to see the
"real thing." In a sense this constitutes an argument in favor of
bootlegs -- especially those of such poor quality that no one would
confuse them with the "real thing." That doesn't mean I now favor
bootlegs (and showing bootlegs in a class for which students are
paying tuition is yet again a different matter than posting them on
the Web), but I have to acknowledge this experience as an argument in
their favor.
The mantra "information wants to be free" in a way applies to poor
quality bootlegs, insfoar anyone can see these as "information" about
the work rather than anything like the actual work.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.