Re: UbuWeb, High Beam, Millennium Film Journal

From: William Wees, Dr. (email suppressed)
Date: Fri Jun 20 2008 - 09:34:34 PDT


ProQuest provides on-line articles from any journal that signs up with
it. Many university libraries subscribe to ProQuest so that students and
faculty can access journal articles that are not in journals on the
shelves of the library.

But if Millennium didn't sign a contract with ProQuest, they shouldn't
be making Millennium articles available.

--Bill Wees

William C. Wees,
Emeritus Professor (McGill University)
Postal address:
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
McGill University
853 Sherbrooke St. West--Arts W225
Montreal, QC H3A 2T6
Phone: 514 398-4935 Fax: 514 398-7247

-----Original Message-----
From: Experimental Film Discussion List
[mailto:email suppressed] On Behalf Of millennium film
journal
Sent: June 20, 2008 12:15 PM
To: email suppressed
Subject: Re: UbuWeb, High Beam, Millennium Film Journal

I'm not 100% sure I want to force High Beam to remove the articles.
After all, it does provide another route to our materials. Millennium
could, of course, use any extra income . . .

Robert, thanks for looking at the copyright notice. No, have never
heard of or dealt with ProQuest. Also the notice is inaccurate, since
our policy is that the authors, not the organization, retain copyright
of their texts. Millennium retains copyright of the layout in the
journal. This gets worse and worse.

Grahame Weinbren
Editor
Millennium Film Journal
email suppressed

On Jun 20, 2008, at 11:54 AM, Robert Schaller wrote:

> I visited the link to High Beam and viewed the "Copyright
> Information" for
> one of the articles, and got this:
>
> "Copyright information Copyright Millennium Film Workshop Inc. Fall
> 2006.
> Provided by ProQuest LLC"
>
> What is ProQuest LLC? Is it not just High Beam taking articles, but
> another
> company taking articles and selling them to third parties like high
> beam,
> all without ever getting copyright clearance? Does anyone know
> about this?
> Have you, Grahame, ever heard of ProQuest? If not, how can they
> provide
> something -- copyright -- that they don't have in the first place?
>
> On 6/20/08 6:55 AM, "millennium film journal" <email suppressed>
> wrote:
>
>> I have been following the Ubuweb discussion with interest. Of
>> course I
>> agree that artists have a right to control and compensation, and that
>> image quality is often of paramount importance. But I also believe
>> that works produced by independent film- and video-makers are of
>> enormous cultural significance. Many of the moving image works
>> celebrated in Frameworks should be as highly valued and readily
>> available, as central to our education and visual culture, as the
>> works of Van Gogh, Pollock, or Monet. On these grounds, there is
>> something positive about Ubuweb, or at least to the intentions behind
>> it . . .
>>
>> I have been an editor of the Millennium Film Journal for a couple of
>> decades. We made the journal available on-line in the early days of
>> the web. The idea was that access to writings about art cinema is a
>> way of disseminating knowledge of the work. http://mfj-online.org
>> contains full texts of articles and indexes, but no images. The
>> website is always a few issues behind the printed version, and essays
>> on the site only go back to 1992, when we started receiving texts in
>> file form. The amount of traffic we get indicates that many people
>> use
>> the site as a resource. The finances of the journal are never secure,
>> but we are willing to lose potential sales for the sake of making
>> scholarship about experimental cinema available . . .
>>
>> I recently found that our articles are being offered for sale on-
>> line:
>>
>> http://www.highbeam.com/Millennium+Film+Journal/publications.aspx
>>
>> It is the counterpoint to the Ubuweb problem. This outfit, High Beam,
>> is selling what we are trying to give away. Does anybody have any
>> ideas what we should do about this?
>>
>>
>> Grahame Weinbren
>> Editor
>> Millennium Film Journal
>> http://mfj-online.org
>>
>>
>> __________________________________________________________________
>> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
>
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.

__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.