Pirates of the Netibbean

Frameworks is a listserv that list-serves the community surrounding experimental film, and whose archives are public. Recently, it was impromptu forum for a debate about whether or not to celebrate the hacking of UbuWeb. One of the participants claimed that the hacking was “good news” for all those opposed to Ubu’s supposed piracy. Other members of the community responded with their respective yays and nays, and today Ubu creator/curator Kenneth Goldsmith posted an open letter to the Frameworks community, which he writes:

Yet, in terms of how we've gone about building the archive, if we had to ask for permission, we wouldn't exist. Because we have no money, we don't ask permission. Asking permission always involves paperwork and negotiations, lawyers, and bank accounts. Yuk. But by doing things the wrong way, we've been able to pretty much overnight build an archive that's made publicly accessible for free of charge to anyone. And that in turn has attracted a great number of film and video makers to want to contribute their works to the archive legitimately.

While, on the surface, it seems like this debate is specific to the film community (for whom the question of digital reproduction and pixilated piracy is urgent to the distribution and sale of their work), it raises questions that poets are soon going to have to address with regards to their own work. As our folders of PDF’d books become more expansive, certain unresolved problems arise: who owns this material, and who has the right to share it?