Rick Prelinger Sings My Thesis?

“The Internet has given all of us the ability to produce, distribute, and share cultural and intellectual creations as never before, something quite threatening to a number of media companies who’d like to control the publishing process as they once did. … As with the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, San Francisco has become a  key center in a geography of resistance to ruling ideas about the control of culture.” (pg 232)

“What ties together all these artists and activists who work in different genres is the acceptance that creation is a synthetic process, that the seeds of new work fall out old, that culture doesn’t form in isolation, and that performing and distributing work don’t necessarily constitute billable events.” (234)

“…bloggers seek to establish (and arguably already have built) a parallel mediasphere in which shared convictions, virtuosity or expression, and the esteem of one’s peers govern what makes the news, rather than the decisions of highly paid editors and publishers. Though blogging isn’t inherently about appropriation or reworking copyright, bloggers quore, recontextualize, slice and dice, comment and crticize up to and well beyond the narrow limits of fair use.” (236)

From: Prelinger, Rick. “Toward a Copyright-Free Zone?” The Political Edge. Chris Carlsson, ed. [San Francisco: City Lights Foundation, 2004] 231 – 237.

Notes from Free Press: Underground & Alternative Publications 1965-1975

(ed. Jean-Francois Bizot, Universe Publishing, NY, 2006)

“An outgrowth of the global youth movement, the underground press documented everything from politics and art to film and fashion…The ideas unleashed in these vintage publications continue to reverberate through society and influence public discourse and graphic design in the form of today’s zines and online blogs.” (front sleeve, Bizot?)

John Wilcock: co-founder of Village Voice, the Underground Press Syndicate (UPS), Other Scenes & editor of The East Village Other (EVO), (pg 6):

“…I hate copyrights which castrate the propagation of free ideas between free people.”

Barry Miles, Foreword (pg 6)

alt press as filling a cultural gap (specifically between the east and west villages)

“…so they came up with the idea of th UPS to disseminate their articles and cartoons across the world. A genuine excercise in subversion. It was very simple: UPS members agreed to send their papers to all the other members and to allow them to reprint anything from them with no fee or even acknowledgment. All it took was a letter to the UPS saying you existed.”

underground press –> underground community (crashing, meals, showing around city)

“The spirit of the underground press lives on: in the late seventies there were several hundred punk magazines with wonderful names like Sniffin’ Glue … Many of the same people went on to found the cyber-revolution, and made sure the internet embodied the fundamental principle that ‘information should be free’. The internet, with its great unsorted jumble of facts, lies and misreporting, is in many ways like the underground press, and the advent of personal blogs means that everyone can now publish their own paper.”