• Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills (1993)
  
  
• Film Research on the Internet

Report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Society For Cinema Studies,
"Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills"
by Kristin Thompson

Since the mid-1960s, the serious study of the cinema has expanded enormously. Many universities, colleges, and high schools now offer courses in the area. Moreover, scholarly publishing on cinema has burgeoned and gained respectability. Several scholarly presses now regularly bring out books on the subject, and there are refereed film journals.

One important facet of the rise of cinema as an academic discipline has been a new concern to illustrate articles and books with frame enlargements rather than publicity photos. Publicity photos are made on the set with still cameras, to simulate a scene in the film. They almost invariably use different framings and lighting set-ups than are used during the filming of the scene with the motion-picture camera. Some publicity photos even represent actions that are not displayed in the finished film. Such photos can be of use for certain purposes, as when historians study lost footage from films like Greed or The Magnificent Ambersons For purposes of analyzing finished films, however, many scholars believe that photographs made from frames of the actual film strip are preferable, since they reproduce an actual composition that appears in a shot.

The legal status of such reproductions of frames has remained problematic. Does the use of a frame enlargement violate copyright? Should the scholar contact the copyright holder to obtain permission to reproduce frames, and, if the firm demands a fee for such permission, does it have to be paid? Similarly, for those scholars who use publicity photographs, there arises the question of whether their reproduction requires permission from and payment to a film company or archive.

Actual practice in the area of illustrating film-related publications has been confused and inconsistent. Some American academic presses and journals do not consider the obtaining of permission necessary, since their authors are using the illustrations for scholarly and educational purposes. Other presses insist that their authors secure such permission. In some cases, authors have been forbidden by the copyright owner to reproduce the frames and have had to publish without illustrations or use a poor substitute, such as sketches of the original frames. In a few cases, scholars seeking to reproduce large numbers of frames have agreed to pay a permission fee on each, with the total running into five figures. (The fees demanded by major American film companies have typically been in the neighborhood of $100-$250 per frame.) Other authors have paid lesser sums for small numbers of frames. Still others have not sought out permissions but have published works copiously illustrated with frame enlargements.

The ad hoc Society for Cinema Studies Committee on Fair Usage Publication of Film Stills was formed in order to devise a policy statement that could provide both authors and presses with information and guidelines to help them with decisions concerning the reproduction of frame enlargements and publicity photographs. The recommendations contained in this report should in no way be considered legally binding. So far no legal precedent has been set that would firmly determine the status of frame reproductions or publicity photos. If litigation were initiated concerning fair use, the judgment would be rendered on the basis of the specific case, and there are no precise rules that would allow an author to predict the outcome. This report simply gathers available information and offers a series of tentative conclusions based on the existing fair-use law, the views of experts in the area of copyright, the policies of a number of prominent scholarly-press and trade editors, and the experiences of scholars who have used-or been denied the use of-frame enlargements and publicity photos in their publications.[1]

Film-related Illustrations and Fair Use. "Fair use" refers to a provision in American law that allows scholars and educators to quote or reproduce small portions of copyrighted works in various media without obtaining permission from the copyright holder. The entire text of the fair-use provision (United States Code, title 17, section 107) runs as follows:

Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of section 106, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies of phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.[2]

In the United States, for copyright purposes, films are classified as audiovisual rather than literary works, although it is possible to copyright a screenplay. Fair use, as it is generally assumed to apply to films, implicitly takes them to be primarily comparable to visual arts like painting. (Film sound tracks are in fact allowed to be separately copyrighted, while image tracks of sound films are not.) Films consist, in whole (in the case of silent films) or in part (in the case of sound films), of a lengthy series of photographs. Thus a film frame is, in essence, a tiny detail of a larger visual work.

Let us return to the four provisions of the fair-use section quoted above. Most frame enlargements are reproduced in books that clearly fall into the first provision's categories of "teaching," "criticism," "scholarship," or "research," and hence there seems little doubt that such illustrations would qualify as fair use by this criterion. Since most university presses are nonprofit institutions, illustrations in their books and journals would be more likely to fall into the fair-use category than would publications by more commercial presses. The classroom use of frame enlargements in the form of slides would be even more likely to fall under the provisions of the fair-use doctrine, and indeed there has been little or no controversy over such usage.

Thus this provision would tend to favor the scholarly use of frame enlargements. The use of such illustrations in scholarly press, journal, and classroom contexts is clearly intended for educational rather than profit-making purposes. The United States Supreme Court stated that "every commercial [emphasis added] use of copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of the monopoly privilege" (Sony Corp. v. Universal Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 451 [1984]). This does not automatically mean that noncommercial uses are assumed to fall within fair use, but this decision may carry such an implication.

The case of trade presses publishing scholarly and educational film books is less clear. There has been no clear test of whether fair use applies in such cases as well. So far, however, the courts do not seem to assume that all such publications are "commercial" and hence not serious scholarship. (See Maxtone-Graham v. Burtchaell, 803 F. 2d. 1253 [2d Cir. 1986], cert. denied, 481 US 1059 [1987].) It would appear that the fair-use provision favors all scholarly and educational publications, albeit more strongly in the case of nonprofit presses.

The Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, has suggested what "the nature of the copyrighted work" (the second provision in the fair-use law) might imply in this context: "motion pictures, by their nature, require quite substantial amounts of capital investment and consequently they have not been subject to all of the limitations applied to other owners of copyrighted material." He cites House and Senate reports that identify fair use as applying "under appropriate circumstances ... to the performance of a short excerpt from a motion picture for criticism or comment."[3] This particular idea would be more relevant to educators using film clips in their classes than to scholars seeking to reproduce frames. Still, it establishes that there are situations in which fair use does apply to motion pictures.

A crucial point in relation to this second factor is that motion pictures are almost invariably published works. There have been recent court cases that severely limited the fair-use law as it relates to unpublished works, since their creators cannot be assumed to have placed their creations before the public, thus subjecting them to analysis and comment. Professor Peter Jaszi, a specialist in copyright law, comments on the implications of such decisions: "In the same vein, it seems reasonable to argue that by distributing a motion picture, a copyright owner has chosen to invite criticism and comment. It is hard to imagine that there could be any complaint about the use of stills to illustrate (for example) newspaper reviews of films currently in release, nor is it easy to see what principle distinction can be drawn between contemporaneous criticism and retrospective criticism."[4] Again, there are grounds for believing that frame enlargements may fall into the provisions of the fair-use law.

As to the third clause quoted above, no guidelines have been formulated, through either legislation or litigation, that specify a number or proportion of frames that may be reproduced from a single film. In an individual case, qualitative as well as quantitative factors would weigh in a final decision on fair-use status. At twenty-four frames per second, a ninety-minute feature would consist of around 129,600 frames; it seems possible that even the reproduction of a hundred frames (less than one tenth of 1 percent) would be considered too small a portion to be infringing on copyright protection.

It might be argued by the copyright holder that each shot is a single image and hence the proportion should be counted on the basis of total number of shots rather than number of frames in a film. Thus if a film contained five hundred shots in ninety minutes, the reproduction of one hundred frames would be claimed to constitute 20 percent. This argument seems dubious, however, since scholars often reproduce several frames from a single shot, to show the changes that occur within it. Moreover, since many films contain long takes of several minutes, a single shot can hardly be counted as equivalent to a small basic unit of measurement (comparable to, say, individual words as the basis for measuring fair use in literary works). Otherwise, by the logic of counting shots as the unit of measurement, a scholar who used a hundred frames from Hitchcock's Rope would have reproduced around a thousand percent of the film's images. Another aspect of this issue is raised by the fact that some films (for example, Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera) contain many shots consisting of a single frame. Since it is impossible to make a shot that consists of less than one frame, the single frame would seem to be the unit of measurement most useful to the issue of fair use.

A copyright holder suing an author on the grounds of copyright infringement would have to show that, under the fourth provision quoted above, the author's illustrations had harmed the "potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." This crucial provision also weighs heavily in favor of fair use for frame enlargements. It seems highly unlikely that a film company could demonstrate that people looking at frame enlargements, in no matter what quantity, reproduced in a scholarly book or article, would as a result be less inclined to see the film in question. Indeed, it can be argued that scholarly and educational publications that discuss films and use frame illustrations arouse interest in the original film and hence act as a form of publicity. When teachers and professors choose to use a book or article containing such illustrations in a classroom situation, they are also presumably more likely to rent a copy of the film to show to their students. The fact that several film distributors (mostly small companies and importers) in this country cooperate in assisting writers of educational and scholarly works suggests that they see such a potential advantage for themselves in the form of additional rentals. Moreover, some scholarly and educational books list distribution sources for the films they discuss, further reinforcing the idea that such works add to, rather than detract from, the commercial value of the films discussed.

Indeed, it seems clear that copyright laws pertaining to motion pictures were intended to protect filmmakers against illegal copying and performances of films rather than against the publication of frames on paper. In the very early years of the cinema, producers wished to copyright motion pictures in order to prevent the duping of films by unscrupulous distributors. Film piracy has remained a problem over the intervening decades, usually because duped prints or extra prints made by laboratory employees in the United States have been sold abroad before legal distribution contracts could be made in far-flung markets. Today, with the spread of video reproduction, the problem has intensified. Not only are illegal 35mm prints struck and sold in such markets as the Far East, but thousands of video copies are made and sold here and abroad even before the wide release of the film. All such practices are clearcut violations of copyright protection.

The commercial exploitation of films typically involves their being projected in such a way as to create the illusion of movement. Traditionally such projection has occurred in theaters, with light thrown from a projector through a print onto a screen. More recently, projection has also come to include the scanning back-projection mechanism of the television monitor and front-projection video technologies. Frame enlargements, however, do not duplicate the film in this way. A film frame, when printed on a page, cannot be projected as a portion of the original. It cannot create the illusion of movement, nor does it reproduce the sound that most films still in copyright involve. Even if we were to print every single frame of a film in a book, the result would in no way replicate the viewing experience. It is hard to imagine a person who has seen even thousands of frames reproduced deciding that he/she had "seen" the film and as a result had no need or desire to see it projected.[5]

It is interesting in this context to note the history of the forms in which films have been copyrighted. From 1895 to 1912, the famous "paper prints" were the main form of copyright deposit material. That is, every frame of the original film was printed as a photograph on a long roll of paper. This practice arose because films could not be copyrighted as such and had to be copyrighted as a series of photographs.[6] Motion pictures became copyrightable in 1912, though there was no specific deposit law until 1942. At that point, a submission for copyright had to be accompanied by a print of the entire film (identical or very close to the version projected in theaters). Submissions of film prints remain the standard means of copyright to this day. The implication of this change may be that photographs of the original film reproduced on paper, even though they duplicate every frame, are not the equivalent of the film itself. Library of Congress policy assumes that only a projectable film strip is such an equivalent. The medium of film is thus quite different from that of literature, where any quotation of the work (even, say, in braille) is a literal reproduction of a portion of the work.

It could be argued that, if a writer uses frame enlargements to illustrate a scholarly or educational publication, and if that publication finds a market, then its sales prove that there is a "potential market" for this type of use of film illustrations. In other words, the market value of the original film could be considered to be unlimited, depending only on the ways people find to exploit it. In practice, the courts have proceeded on the assumption that the copyright holders should be protected in those primary, secondary, and ancillary markets from which they could reasonably expect to gain their income. So far there is no basis for thinking that the copyright holders of motion pictures have ever included the scholarly use or licensing of frame enlargements as part of their predictable stream of income from their films. Such income is not part of the estimated revenues from a film, and so far, whatever money production firms have taken in by granting "permissions" for the publication of frame enlargements has been collected on an occasional, informal basis. Even if copyright holders were to gain some regular income from the exploitation of frame enlargements, scholarly uses of such illustrations might still fall within the fair-use guidelines, since they would not necessarily impinge on that income.

Again, all this suggests that, for educators and scholars, the question of actual competition with motion pictures as such would relate more to the replication of small stretches of the film in a form capable of being projected to create the illusion of movement. Such uses might include a professor's duplication of a short scene from 16mm film in order to show it repeatedly from semester to semester, in a classroom context. This issue, however, lies outside the scope of this report.

Frame Enlargements as Derivative Works. Ralph Oman has suggested another aspect of this question of commercial competition: "For noncommercial uses, the burden is on the copyright owner to show 'by a preponderance of the evidence that some meaningful likelihood of future harm exists.' A copyright owner generally has the exclusive right to make a derivative work, such as a frame enlargement from a motion picture. The courts, in making a fair use analysis, would look at the market for derivative works in determining potential commercial harm." The implication of this view is that the making of frame enlargements should not be considered potential competition with the commercial value of the film itself. Rather, in Oman's opinion, frame enlargements are derivative works made from the film, and their fair-use status should be considered in relation to their potential competition with any comparable derivative works made by the studio itself for commercial purposes. Thus if the making of frame enlargements had a commercial value, and if film companies printed such illustrations and sold them in some fashion, then scholarly reproduction of frames might be harmful to the studio's market for their own illustrations.

It is plausible that certain uses of frame enlargements might have a commercial, noneducational value that might someday conflict with the studios' rights to make derivative works from their films. If, for example, an individual took a frame enlargement and printed it on T-shirts and sold them, that action might violate copyright, since the studio that made the film might someday choose to market such shirts itself. Even if the studios were to make such shirts, however, it is unlikely that the same frame enlargements, previously published in scholarly articles, would harm the commercial value of studio-produced T-shirts bearing frame enlargements. Because of the provision concerning commercial value, however, publishers--even those that do not seek permission to reproduce frames inside the book--will sometimes pay a fee for the right to print a frame on the cover. This is because the cover design is presumed to function mainly to publicize the book; that particular illustration is not vital to the analysis in the text, while the photos inside are.

According to Oman, the final determination in the case of both university and commercial presses would rest on whether their reproduction of frames "would threaten the potential market for any work that the copyright owner wants to publish--for example, a book about the film by the copyright owner--even if the copyright owner has never released such a book in the past."[7] Authors and publishers must judge for themselves, first, whether film studios are likely to publish books about their own films using frame enlargements and, second, whether such hypothetical books would lose market value as a result of competition from scholarly or educational material of the sort now available. In the past, publications created by the studios themselves, such as souvenir programs, or approved by them, such as "official" studio histories and "making of" books related to individual films, have usually been illustrated with publicity photos rather than frame enlargements.

Publicity Photographs. Indeed, the fair-use arguments applying to scholarly and educational uses of publicity photos from films are less clear. Reproducing such a photo involves showing the whole work, or at least a substantial portion of it. The photograph is not a derivative work based on a film, but a separately copyrightable work.

Many such photos, however, were never copyrighted and hence can be reproduced at will. As Gerald Mast points out, "According to the old copyright act, such production stills were not automatically copyrighted as part of the film and required separate copyrights as photographic stills. The new copyright act similarly excludes the production still from automatic copyright but gives the film's copyright owner a five-year period in which to copyright the stills. Most studios have never bothered to copyright these stills because they were happy to see them pass into the public domain, to be used by as many people in as many publications as possible." Mast believes that there is thus no reason for scholars to pay permission fees to publish such photographs: "There is no question that publishers have paid thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of dollars to film companies for precisely this purpose on public domain material."[8]

Some original photos of film scenes released during the classical age of Hollywood filmmaking bear a specific notice at the bottom releasing the rights of reproduction to newspapers and magazines. For example, an original publicity photo for Singin' in the Rain carries this notice: "Copyright 1952, Loew's Inc. Permission granted for Newspaper and Magazine reproduction. Made in U.S.A." This notice implies a recognition of the publicity value of such reproduction, and film journals might plausibly be considered "magazines." It might be argued that, as with frame enlargements, the reproduction of publicity stills in a scholarly context enhances rather than detracts from the commercial value of the original film. Persons wishing to use such illustrations would do well to examine the fine print at the bottom of the photograph. Unfortunately, most scholars work with copies of publicity stills, and in these the original copyright notices and other information have usually been eliminated from the lower white border. In past practice, however, many scholarly and educational publications have used publicity stills without obtaining permission from the original copyright holder.

Ralph Oman points out that there may be restrictions on such photographs:

However, many of these works are presumably "unpublished" in accordance with the definition in the Copyright Act of 1909 because limited distributions were held not to constitute publication. No copyright notice was required for unpublished works. So conceivably many publicity stills that were without copyright notice did enjoy common law protection, though that protection may now have expired (see 17 U.S.C. 303). It was not necessary to secure protection for unpublished works by registering with the Copyright Office. Again, the facts of the distribution of the publicity still will be determinative of the issue of copyright protection for each case.[9]

In many cases, studios have deposited large numbers of publicity photographs in archives, and many of these photos have never been published. The studios may or may not have specified in the terms of the deposit any restrictions on the use of those photographs. If there is no proviso forbidding reproduction by scholars, it might be that such deposit implies an assumption of unlimited distribution, since the studio is presumably aware that such archives make these materials available to researchers. Again, scholars and publishers must use their best judgment in dealing with such cases.

One important argument has been made concerning the publication of publicity photographs. If such a photograph has been circulated for publication at some point and reproduced without a copyright notice accompanying it, it should then fall within the public domain. Throughout the history of the cinema, many publicity photos have appeared in newspapers and magazines without such notices. If a scholar or educator were to publish a publicity photo, the burden of proof would then fall on the studio or distributor to prove that the still had never been published without the copyright notice. Given that many publicity photos reproduced in scholarly books and articles have previously appeared in journalistic contexts, it would seem that these often fall into the public domain.

Reproducing a publicity still might be argued as being somewhat comparable to reproducing a painting or other single copyrighted art work. In his book on copyright, William A. Strong does not address the issue of publicity stills (or frame enlargements). What he says about painting may, however, be relevant: "These principles of moderation also apply to scholarly use of visual works. Reproduction of an entire painting, even if reduced and in black and white, would generally infringe the artist's copyright. However, reproduction as necessary to analyze the artist's technique (or to teach Pac-Man strategy) would probably constitute a fair use. Display of works of art in a classroom situation is fair use, as is incidental display or performance in a news broadcast."[10] Strong's opinion would suggest that a publicity photo could be reproduced in toto as long as such reproduction is clearly necessary to the analytical or technical argument. In recent years there has been a move to analyze publicity photos as aesthetic or cultural artifacts in their own right, as well as to study advertisements and other graphic material relating to films. Strong's opinion suggests that,for such scholarly purposes, even the reproduction of whole pictures might fall within fair use.

Apart from the immediate question of whether a scholar has the legal right to use a publicity photograph, there is the question of fees paid to archives or photo services for permission to reproduce such a photo. Several film archives charge a basic fee for the copying of photographs and add a higher fee if the photograph is to be reproduced in a published work. Other collections sell photographs but emphasize that by doing so they are not granting rights for reproduction. Ordinarily such archives specify that, if the photo is printed in an article or book, the author should attribute its source. In many cases, when authors obtain photographs from archives, they simply acknowledge that archive as the source, without paying a permission fee to the archive or any supposed copyright holder. Indeed, unless the archive has somehow become the holder of the photograph's copyright,it has no legal basis for requiring a reproduction fee. In other cases, the author already owns a photograph that he/she reproduces, and in the publication the author cites it as "from the collection of the author."

In general, etiquette would dictate that scholars and educators attribute the sources for publicity photographs in their publications, especially in cases where individuals or archives have preserved otherwise inaccessible images. Existing practice suggests, however, that, over the years, there has developed a tacit acknowledgment that publicity stills may be used in scholarly works without permission. Again, authors and presses should consider each specific case in judging whether a publicity photo is likely to be legally reproducible.

Conclusions. The legal situation concerning the reproduction of film frames and publicity stills remains undetermined. There has been no litigation or legislation to set precedents for fair use of frame enlargements and publicity photos. It appears, moreover, that this situation will persist. Legal decisions based on future court cases might help illuminate this question, but, given the difficulty of proving that such illustrations diminish the commercial viability of a film or of derivative products, it seems unlikely that such a case will be initiated. In the meantime, authors and publishers must go on making decisions about the use of frame enlargements and publicity photos. Still, based on the many books and articles that have included such illustrations, one might argue that a long-standing common practice has been established that could be drawn upon in arguing any case for the the application of fair-use guidelines to cinematic images.

Even if the author and press do not seek permission to reproduce illustrations, it is a good idea to be both cautious and courteous by listing in the publication the original copyright holder. This can be done in the captions to the photographs or in a separate section at the beginning or ending of the book. For example, a frame enlargement or publicity photo from Laura could be credited "Copyright 1944, 20th Century-Fox." There is no specific legal requirement for such a citation, but its use does indicate that the author is drawing attention to the owner of the copyright and hence helping to publicize the film. In responding to an inquiry from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson concerning fair use of frame enlargements in scholarly publications, Acting Deputy Librarian of Congress Winston Tabb expressed this opinion (in relation to Film Art: An Introduction):[11] "The work in which you are engaged seems clearly to be of the scholarly kind envisioned in the 'fair use' provisions of the copyright law." He approved their practice of "crediting copyright owners of photographs."[12]

Many publishers have brought out scholarly works that utilize visual material, frame enlargements, and publicity stills. At the 1986 Society for Cinema Studies conference in New Orleans, a round-table discussion of publishing was held. Members of the panel included two editors who had been involved in publishing scholarly books on cinema that used frame enlargements. Joanna Hitchcock, then of Princeton University Press (now of the University of Texas Press), and William Germano, then of Columbia University Press (now of Routledge), both expressed the opinion that it is not necessary for authors to request permission to reproduce frame enlargements. Other university presses operate with similar policies. Some trade presses that publish educational and scholarly film books also take the position that permission is not necessary for reproducing frame enlargements and publicity photographs.

Nevertheless, some publishers demand that all photos be "cleared," whatever their copyright status. Authors may then be faced with the prospect of trying to contact companies, filmmakers, or photographers long out of business or dead. In many cases, the images were never in copyright, and hence finding someone who "owns the rights" is impossible. In other cases, the current copyright status is dubious, and permission is at any rate not necessary for scholarly use. Authors thus waste time and energy, when permission is most likely unnecessary for the reproduction of the photographs. Some authors are unable to use adequate illustrations simply because they cannot find anyone with the right to sell or grant them the permission for such reproduction. The Library of Congress's Copyright Office provides a search service (involving a fee) to help determine whether a work is currently in copyright; researchers wishing to determine the copyright status, say, of a publicity photograph, may wish to make inquiries there. Researchers may also do their own searches, free of charge, by visiting the Copyright Office.

So far, educational and scholarly books utilizing frame enlargements and publicity stills without permission have met with no legal challenge. Such illustrations have become common practice, and common practice has an effect in setting legal precedent. If more books and articles on the cinema appear using illustrations for which no permissions have been obtained, such practice will grow. Similarly, authors and editors should consider whether asking for permission "just to be safe" might make it more difficult for others to use illustrations from films with impunity. Mast has offered this opinion: "The publisher or author who asks permission to publish a production still or frame blow-up provides a de facto admission that permission is required and that the principle of fair use does not apply. The legal solution, then, is for authors and publishers to articulate their applications of the fair use principle in advance, perhaps in a letter of understanding between them, and then not seek permission from any copyright owner to publish any production still or frame enlargement from a film."" Thus in negotiating the publication of a book or article, authors who are committed to the use of frame enlargements and/or publicity stills should determine before signing a contract whether their prospective press requires the obtaining of permission to reproduce such illustrations. Presses should make clear their policies to authors and should consider in formulating those policies whether requesting such permission is necessary.

In commenting on this issue, Professor Jaszi has suggested that such policies would do well to take a generous view of fair-use and the use of frame enlargements:

As a teacher and writer in the field of copyright law, I am firmly convinced that the use of stills to illustrate serious works of film scholarship constitutes "fair use" within the meaning of section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, and I would urge the Society, its members, and their cooperating publishers to proceed on the basis of this understanding of the law....

In sum, I think the case for "fair use" in connection with scholarly, analytical, or critical use of frame enlargements is a particularly strong one. I would hope that the archives with which film scholars deal, and the publishers through whom those scholars issue their work, could be persuaded that they do not risk liability by cooperating in the use of such frame enlargements.[14]

As Jaszi suggests, the question of fair use also has implications relating to access to archival prints for making frame enlargements, but, again, that issue lies outside the limits of the current report.

Finally, we would suggest that one further argument arises from the concept of the public good. If film scholars were to be denied the right to reproduce frames from and photographs relating to films, their ability to enlighten readers about the history and aesthetic qualities of motion pictures would be severely diminished. Much is made of the fact that young people today are exposed to far more visual material in the form of films and television than they are to literary works. If educators are to have the ability to teach about such works, they should be able to illustrate their analyses adequately, using images made directly from the original works. If scholars are to be able to add new insights to our knowledge of cinematic art works, they should have comparable rights.[15]

Appendix

[The Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, has requested that the two letters he has written to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson regarding this issue be published as an addendum to this report. They appear here in their entirety. Since the report has been revised on the basis of information and suggestions supplied by Mr. Oman, some of the passages he refers to here have been altered or eliminated. References to page numbers are to the original letters rather than to the pagination of this published report.]

[Letter from Ralph Oman to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, dated 13 June 1990:]

Dear Mr. Bordwell and Ms. Thompson:

First let me apologize for the delay in responding to your letter which somehow got lost in our system. I am happy to provide you with information on the fair use doctrine. Of course, the Regulations of the Copyright Office (CFR, Title 37, Chapter 11) prohibit us from giving specific legal advice on the rights of persons in connection with particular uses of copyrighted works.

In addition, the Copyright Office is not able to give you specific guidelines regarding "fair use" because in general the courts have not developed such specific guidelines nor do they appear in the statute. For certain copying situations, principally involving education, voluntary guidelines have been developed by agreement of associations representing authors, copyright owners, and librarians or educators. These guidelines and the statutory materials are reprinted in the enclosed Circular 21.

The fair use doctrine in this country, now more than one hundred and fifty

years old, is codified in section 107 of the Copyright Act. Because Section 107 encompasses the principles of countless cases, it must be understood as shorthand for what it represents. Only a reading of case law can provide the actual application of the statute in each case because ultimately, the courts are charged with the final determination of what is "fair use" under the Copyright Act.

The distinction between "fair use" and infringement may be unclear, and it is difficult to draw distinctions. I can only give you the relevant text and materials but you must decide whether or not to seek permission from the copyright owners for particular uses. Acknowledging the source of the copyrighted materials does not substitute for obtaining permission.

Section 106 of the copyright law provides that copyright owners have the right to:

(1) reproduce the copyrighted work in copies or phonorecords;

(2) prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;

(3) to distribute copies or phonorecords of the copyrighted work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownerships, or by rental, lease, or lending;

(4) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works, to perform the copyrighted work publicly; and

(5) in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture work or other audiovisual work, to display the copyrighted work publicly.

Fair use, found in section 107, is a limitation on the exclusive rights of copyright owners listed above, provided the use is for the purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research." Section 107 lists four factors to be used in any particular case to determine whether the use made of a work is a fair use. These factors are:

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;

(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;

(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and

(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

With respect to the first factor, your letter describes the making of frame enlargements for two disparate purposes, one a nonprofit educational purpose (classroom teaching) and the other for a commercial venture (reproduction in a book). It is more likely that the courts would determine that making a frame enlargement for the first purpose would be a fair use while the second would be more questionable. Note that the statute specifically mentions nonprofit educational purposes which distinguishes profitable educational uses.

With respect to the "nature of the copyrighted work" being copied, motion pictures, by their nature, require quite substantial amounts of capital investment and consequently they have not been subject to all of the limitations applied to other owners of copyrighted material. The House and Senate reports did identify fair use as applying "under appropriate circumstances ... to the nonsequential showing of an individual still or slide, or to the performance of a short excerpt from a motion picture for criticism or comment" H.R. Rept. No. 94-1476, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. 72-73 (1976); S. Rep. No. 94-473, 94th Cong. 1st Sess. 65 (1975). This applies only to the display or performance of the work and is silent regarding the reproduction of these works in whole or in part.

The third fair use factor is the "amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole." If the reproduction of a single frame enlargement for classroom use is a fair use, the making of additional frame enlargements from the same motion picture will at some point infringe that work.

There is no specific number of images or words that may be safely taken without permission. The courts have also looked at the qualitative taking in addition to the quantity, so that the taking of the most valuable portions of a particular work even if a relatively small portion, can be an infringement.

The last factor in the fair use analysis is the effect of the use on the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work. Using the market effect inquiry the Supreme Court has held that "every commercial use of copyrighted material is presumptively an unfair exploitation of the monopoly privilege that belongs to the owner of the copyright." Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417, 451 (1984).

For noncommercial uses, the burden is on the copyright owner to show "by a preponderance of the evidence that some meaningful likelihood of future harm exists." A copyright owner generally has the exclusive right to make a derivative work, such as a frame enlargement from a motion picture. The courts in making a fair use analysis, would look at the market for derivative works in determining potential commercial harm.

In addition to section 107, the copyright law provides another important limitation on the reproduction and distribution rights of copyright owners when a library or archive is the user. Section 108 exempts certain copying of library or archival materials but only for a "small part" of a copyrighted work and only if the copy "becomes the property of the user, and the library or archive has had no notice that the copy ... would be used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research" 108(d) (1). Notwithstanding these provisions, the person requesting such a copy can be liable if the use exceeds fair use.

Finally, I should say that "fair use" would not be the only bar to use of the Library's materials. Library policy can prohibit certain uses of materials if such use would damage the Library's collection. As I understand it, some of the frame enlargement techniques involve putting film into an attachment on a camera which can potentially damage the film. Any policy to prevent such uses is clearly within the domain of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division and I would suggest you contact them with any changes you wish to see in their policy.

I hope that this letter and the attached materials help to clarify the "fair use" doctrine.

Sincerely,
Ralph Oman
Register of Copyrights

[Letter from Ralph Oman to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, dated 7 January 1992:]

Dear Mr. Bordwell and Ms. Thompson:

Thank you for sending me a copy of the draft report of the Society for Cinema studies regarding frame enlargements of motion pictures and the "fair use" doctrine.

Regarding your request to quote me in your report, I would prefer that, if appropriate, you reproduce, in their entirety, my letters (June 13, 1990 and this one) in the appendix of your report. Otherwise, you have my permission to quote from these letters.

Trying to summarize the judicial doctrine of fair use found in the Copyright Act 17 U.S.C. 107 in a short report is a very difficult task. As you can tell from my letters, there are no easy answers. I have a few comments and clarifications which may help in the preparation of the final report. Ultimately, the courts, and not the Copyright Office, decide each case according to the particular facts of the case, weighing the totality of the factors set out in section 107.

Fair use is a legal defense that is only considered after a determination is made that there is an infringement. There is no infringement where the taking is from works not subject to copyright, due, for example, to the expiration of the copyright (including for post-1978 works for failure to renew or for the publication without adequate copyright notice) or for the taking of uncopyrightable portions of protected works (such as facts). Those materials can be freely reproduced and used for any purpose. For example, films created and published over seventy-five years ago are in the public domain and can be freely used.

The report in discussing the first factor of a fair use analysis (page 5)--the purpose and character of the use"--should emphasize the differences in educational uses. For example, you might mention the use of a few frame enlargements to illustrate a classroom lecture versus the reproduction in a book of frame enlargements. The latter would be construed with less latitude from the user's standpoint in a "fair use" analysis than the former. The fact that a university press is "non-profit" will not be dispositive if the work in question would threaten the potential market value for any work that the copyright owner wants to publish--for example, a book about the film by the copyright owner--even if the copyright owner has never released such a book in the past.

The four factors are weighed in their totality when courts make their fair use analysis.

In addition, the nature of the taking is immaterial--frame enlargements are reproductions of the original copyrighted film. The making of frame enlargements is not "paraphrasing" as your report suggests (pages 13-16), but rather the making of a derivative work protected under the Copyright Act 17 U.S.C. 106(2).

Even paraphrasing would be subject to an action for copyright infringement, as recent court decisions indicate. In Twin Peaks Productions v. Publications International (91 Civ. 0626, S.D.N.Y., November 1991) the District Court found a book publisher had infringed the film's copyright when it "directly copied or paraphrased substantial portions" (emphasis added) of the copyright owner's work. The court in Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Associates 293 F.Supp. 130 (S.D.N.Y. 1968) found no infringement by the fact of that particular decision but held that the making of charcoal sketches of frames of a copyrighted film was the making of "copies of the copyrighted film. That they were done in charcoal by an 'artist' is of no moment.... There is thus an infringement by defendants unless the use of the copyrighted material in the Book is a 'fair use' outside the limits of copyright protection" (Id. at 144). The discussion on page 15 about what the Copyright Office requires for registration purposes should not be confused with what the courts have determined is necessary for copyright protection.

The only question that remains, then, given the four factors of the fair use analysis, is whether or not the making of frame enlargements a [sic] fair use? That question must be decided in each instance on the facts of the case using the four factors-and there are to date no decisions on point. The reprinting of the four factors in your report will be a useful guide for film historians and scholars as they decide these issues for themselves.

As your report notes, the issue of publicity stills raises different legal issues. Photographs are protected under copyright and the reproduction of these works is not a fair use--it is a reproduction of the entire work. The primary issue is whether or not the works were in fact published without notice and were therefore copyrighted at all. If they were published with notice, then you are correct (page 9) that they are not protected by copyright and may be reproduced.

However, many of these works are presumably "unpublished" in accordance with the definition in the Copyright Act of 1909 because limited distributions were held not to constitute publication. No copyright notice was required for unpublished works. So conceivably many publicity stills that were without copyright notice did enjoy common law protection, though that protection may now have expired (see 17 U.S.C. 303). It was not necessary to secure protection for unpublished works by registering with the Copyright Office. Again, the facts of the distribution of the publicity still will be determinative of the issue of the copyright protection for each case.

Finally, I would suggest that you inform your members that they can search the copyright status of works they intend to use by visiting the Copyright Office, or they can have the Office do a search for them, for a fee.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review these materials. If I can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sincerely,

Ralph Oman
Register of Copyrights

Notes

This report was drafted by the committee chairperson, Kristin Thompson, and revised with the aid of the committee members, John Belton, Dana Polan, and Bruce F. Kawin. Our thanks to the Acting Deputy Librarian of Congress, Winston Tabb, and to the Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, for their help and their permission to quote them. Thanks also to Robert W. Kastenmeier, chairman of the National Commission on Judicial Discipline and Removal, and former chairman of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Copyright. We are particularly grateful to Professor Peter Jaszi, of Washington College of Law of the American University, a specialist in copyright law, who offered invaluable comments on the penultimate draft of the report.

1. The reader is urged to examine the letters from the Register of Copyrights, Ralph Oman, reproduced in the appendix. Oman understandably takes a cautious view of fair use, based on copyright law and some precedent-setting decisions. His letters indicate the complexity of this topic and the many views that may be taken. This report, on the other hand, also makes arguments based partly on actual usage in the field of film studies, even when that usage has not been tested in court. 2. Copyright Office, Library of Congress, Reproduction of Copyrighted Works by Educators and Librarians Circular 21 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988), 8.

3. H. R. Rept. No. 94-1476, 94th Cong., 2d Sess. 72-73 (1979; S. Rep. No. 94-473, 94th Cong. 1st Sess. 65 [1975]), quoted in a letter from Ralph Oman (Library of Congress) to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 13 June 1990. Reproduced in the appendix to this report.

4. Letter, Prof. Peter Jaszi (Washington, D.C.) to Kristin Thompson, 30 July 1992.

5. We should point out, however, that Ralph Oman's letter of 13 June 1990 (see appendix) states: "If the reproduction of a single frame enlargement for classroom use is a fair use, the making of additional frame enlargements from the same motion picture will at some point infringe that work." Such infringement presumably could only occur, however, if the copyright owner could show that the commercial value of the original had been diminished.

6. For more on the paper prints, see Kemp R. Niver, Motion Pictures from the Library of Congress Paper Print Collection 1894-1912, ed. Bebe Bergsten (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).

7. See Ralph Oman's letter of 7 January 1992, in the appendix.

8. Gerald Mast, "Film Study and the Copyright Law," in Fair Use and Free Inquiry: Copyright Law and the New Media, ed. John Shelton Lawrence and Bernard Timberg (2d ed., Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1989), 87.

9. Oman letter, 7 January 1992 (see appendix).

10. William A. Strong, The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide (3d ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1990), 138.

11. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (1st ed., Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1979; 2d ed., New York: Random House, 1985; 3d ed., New York: McGraw-Hill, 1990).

12. Letter, Winston Tabb (Washington, D.C.) to David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, 15 April 1991.

13. Mast, "Film Study and Copyright Law," 89.

14. Letter, Jaszi to Thompson.

15. Although this report explores the implications of copyright and fair use laws to film-related illustrations, much of this information may apply to video-related illustrations as well.

SHOTS IN CYBERSPACE: Film research on the Internet (Revised: April 1997)
by Bert Deivert

Note: An earlier version of this document was originally in Cinema Journal 35, No. 1, 1995. © University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

The aim of this article is to acquaint novices and seasoned users of the Internet to some of the resources available for film scholars in various domains of cyberspace. I would like to briefly introduce some useful programs and how they may be used, point users in certain directions for information, and leave the rest up to you. The knowledge needed to use the resources mentioned in this article is within reach of anyone who is willing to invest a few hours into learning the basics of each program and then learn more while working. Exploration at your own pace is the best way to discover the richness and complexity of the Internet.

Since the Internet is a collection of separate and autonomous networks, this article may be out of date by the time it is published. The sites on the Internet are constantly changing, moving, being updated, and in some cases, being taken over by commercial forces. This paper can only offer provisional starting points, since something present in the Internet today may be gone tomorrow. If you would like to update anything that you find erroneous or give me tips about film or television sites not mentioned here, please feel free to contact me.

In order to keep this text from being too cluttered, I will leave a list of sites and addresses for the end of the article.

What is the Internet?

The Internet is the term used for the system of connected commercial and non-commercial computer networks all over the world. Primarily based on university networks established for military and scientific research in the U.S., other smaller networks have subsequently latched on to use the resources of the larger networks, enabling them to have world-wide access. The terms Internet and Net are used for the same virtual space in this paper.

I have been a net surfer, explorer, and information junkie for four years, and have found the Internet to be a tremendous resource for anyone who loves film. Certainly, any film buff or serious student of cinema has every reason to be roaming the Net in search of contacts, discussions and useful information. The sheer size of the Internet, however, estimated at about 3.2 million computer host sites in November 1995 (which are in turn serving who-knows-how-many peripheral computers) makes the gathering of information easy, but the sorting of information and narrowly defined searches difficult. I hope that the list of resources at the end of this article will guide you to useful Internet information about film and video.

The Internet for Beginners

My advice is to get online as soon as possible. Most universities have Internet access for their faculty, and some have access for students. American universities currently have the most advanced facilities in this respect, many of them offering direct Internet connections in student dormitories and computer labs. Many European countries are also catching on to this. Contact the computer support section at your university or college in order to find out how to get connected. At the minimum, you should get an e-mail account.

Commercial services like America Online, Compuserve, Prodigy and Delphi can also hook you up to the Internet. These charge money for Internet access, although competition between these services has helped to lower prices. Though you can get by with just e-mail, go with a commercial provider that gives you full Net access.

Most PCs and university computers use programs that are client-server configurations in which, according to John Levine, "the client runs on your computer, and the other part, the server, runs on a remote computer that has the resources you want to use."[1] Every time you venture onto the Internet, then, you will use your modem to enter the phone lines and connect with another computer that brings you onto the Internet. The client program on your computer also gets information from the server and presents it for you in some readable form. As William Dickson says:

You might think of the server software as being a dessert cart; you're not allowed to put your filthy paws on the pastries, so you need a client, a set of tongs perhaps, to obtain that tasty eclair.[2]

The main question to ask both university and commercial services is: Do you have full Internet access through a SLIP or PPP connection? Without getting too technical about this, let me say that SLIP or PPP connections are preferable because they enable you to call up the service from your home modem and use all the generic programs specific to your computer. If neither connection is available, you may be able to ring up a VAX, UNIX, or other computer to get on the Internet, but these computers are much more difficult to use. (For more information about SLIP and PPP connections, contact me by e-mail.)

Once you are on the Internet, don't be afraid to admit that you are a novice. There are many friendly and helpful individuals out there willing to hold your hand (online) through the most rigorous digital exercises in order to help you get to where you want to go. Most people take great pleasure in helping newcomers get going. There is an almost evangelical aspect of the Internet that would be worth exploring in a research paper.

The Net's Commercial Activity

Commercial possibilities for information brokerage and sales venues online has stimulated many companies to start sites on the Net. The prospects of a totally commercialized Internet is one that I believe is distasteful to the majority of today's users. We are at the brink of a commercial breakthrough on the Internet and if the majority of users in the future are most interested in buying their mail-order products via Internet, there is a danger that it may become just one more glorified shopping channel controlled by government organizations. The free access for academics and information-seekers of various kinds guarantees a certain democracy on the Internet, and I for one hope it stays that way. We will have to put up with a certain amount of anarchy and distasteful activities from some individuals, such as pornography sites or manuals on terrorism. However that is still a very small part of all the activity that goes on throughout the Net.

Internet And Massmedia

Regular features in newspapers, magazines, and programs like CNN's On Ramp have created a demand for more information about the Internet. Many journalists have expounded on the vast richness of information out there, while oversimplifying the easy access to it. A number of specialized magazines, however, especially computer magazines, have published well-documented and informative articles on how to get to the Internet with a home computer and a modem.

I believe the relationship between the Net and printed media will continue. There are already a number of journals, magazines and newspapers available online, and some are published exclusively on the Internet. Time, Wired, The Palo Alto Weekly, The San Jose Mercury News, The San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner and Sweden's Aftonbladet are some examples of printed publications with full-text articles available on the NET. Postmodern Culture, a refereed scholarly journal, is published on the NET by North Carolina State University, Oxford University Press, and the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities.

E-Mail

E-mail is the electronic equivalent of a letter, but e-mail can send digitalized pictures and sounds as well as text correspondence. You can then use the text in your word processing software, and implement the sounds and pictures into your latest multimedia presentation.

E-mail is basically transferring text from one computer to another as a message. Usually the mail you send will look the same on the computer that receives it as it did on the computer used to send it. There is sometimes a problem with alternate characters in languages other than English. Computer support people can help you sort that problem out, or you can just learn to live with it and get used to substituting certain characters that always appear as other ones!

What is an e-mail address?

You may be able to guess where people have their e-mail accounts by looking at the suffixes of the address. The @ symbol means at, and the periods or dots separating the words following the @ indicates a new area of the address. My full address, bert.deivert@epix.hks.se, indicates that my user name is bert.deivert. The user name or I.D. is to the left of the @ symbol, and in this case locates the account for the mail address at a computer called epix. Though hks would be difficult to guess, it is the acronym for Högskolan i Karlstad, the name of my university. The last two letters, se, is the international acronym for Sweden. This last section is called the top domain, and some common geographical and organizational top domains are listed below.[3]

Geographical:                          Organizational:
au - Australia                            com - commercial organization
uk - United Kingdom                       org - non-profit organization
de - Germany                              edu - an educational institution
es - Spain                                mil - military
jp - Japan                                net - networking organizations
us - United States                        gov - government

There are a number of free programs available on the Net from various ftp sites (see ftp section). I use Eudora, which has been developed into a commercial product but is still available free on the NET and works on both Macs and PCs. Sometimes the choice of mail programs is prescribed by the computer politics at your place of work or study. If you don't have a mail program, download Eudora from one of the sites mentioned at the end of the article.

A good mail program should make it easy to set up mailing lists with both individual addresses and group addresses, and Eudora does this. If I wish to mail a letter to a colleague, I can choose his or her name from a menu in the program and the letter will be automatically and conveniently set up with the address written into the correct area. I can also communicate by e-mail with large groups of students, and can hand out assignments, schedule changes, and giving feedback on papers this way. The hardest work is entering all the e-mail addresses into the list the first time.

Eudora also supports attachments. When you send a message, you may attach another kind of document, which will then be delivered along with the message to the account of the addressee. I regularly send Microsoft Word documents and even programs to people. The larger the file, the more risk there is for corruption of the file along the way, but I have had very good results with this.

Most e-mail programs also allow you to design a signature, a block of text that always appears at the end of your e-mail messages. Mine looks like this:

________________________________________________________________
Bert Deivert                    Senior Lecturer, Film Studies
University of Karlstad          E-mail: bert.deivert@hks.se
651 88 Karlstad, Sweden         http://www.hks.se/~bertd/bertd.html
FAX: +46-54-838496              TEL: +46-54-838106
________________________________________________________________

Date: Sat, 01 Apr 1995 10:58:33 -0500 (EST)
From: SGIBSON@VAX2.CONCORDIA.CA
Subject: Re: Cinema Journal
To: Bert.Deivert
Mime-Version: 1.0
Yo Bert,
Saw "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" last night.
Have U seen it yet?
It's really very funny. It earned the Academy Award for Best
Costumes, for sure:
def the most avant-garde costumes I have seen in a while.
We are working hard here, as usual....
What' up with you?
Au plaisir,
Steve

The date and time is on the first line, and the second line records the e-mail address of the person who sent the message. The sender is sometimes listed on the next line along with the actual name of the person. (This doesn't always appear, since it depends on what program one uses and what parameters one sets up.) The next line, the subject line, is very important, since this is the best way to filter out messages one does not wish to read. It also makes clear what the message is about, and is useful if you have had 10 messages from the same person in one day and are trying to find a particular one. The TO: line gives the addressee, and MIME is the name of a program that adds foreign characters to the standard US text table.

One good function in mail programs is Reply, which allows you to reply to a message with a menu or written command. Your response is prepared with the e-mail address automatically written in to the addressee. The reply command also changes the subject line to RE:, followed by whatever the original subject line said.

Net tools by e-mail

There are alternative ways of using advanced NET tools for people who only have e-mail access. For more information about how to use many of the tools on the NET through e-mail, send the following message, send lis-iis e-access-inet.txt , as the first line in the body of a e-mail letter to the address: mailbase@mailbase.ac.uk

Mailbase will then automatically send you an article called Accessing The Internet By E-Mail. One example of a good e-mail tool solves the difficulty of finding e-mail addresses for colleagues and friends. A very simple way to ferret out someone's e-mail address is the following, provided the person in question is likely to have posted to a USENET newsgroup. All addresses of people mailing to newsgroups are logged into a large database which can be searched. Send the message send usenet-addresses/name to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu, and if you need help for this service send the message send usenet-addresses/help to the same address. You change the name in the message to the name you wish to search for. Here is the answer I received on inquiring about my own last name.

Date: Sat, 1 Apr 1995 09:41:47 -0500
From: mail-server@rtfm.MIT.EDU
To: Bert.Deivert (Bert Deivert)
Subject: mail-server: "send usenet-addresses/Deivert"
Reply-To: mail-server@rtfm.MIT.EDU
Precedence: junk
X-Problems-To: owner-mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu
-----cut here-----
Bert Deivert        (Dec 15 94)
Bert Deivert           (Nov 23 94)
bert.deivert@hks.se (Bert Deivert)         (Sep 12 94)
-----cut here-----

Discussion Groups

A discussion group is a subscribable list that you receive through e-mail; the group consists of all the people that have subscribed. Each discussion group has a topic, and many have a moderator or list owner who runs the group, keeps it going if there is a computer problem, and informs people if a discussion is getting out of hand. Some lists are unmoderated free-for-alls and others require e-mail applications sent to the list owner to be approved before one may subscribe to the list. Most lists automatically subscribe anyone who applies and the same goes when you wish to leave the list.

How does it work? Let's look at how to get started with one group. My favorite group is Screen-L, a cinema discussion group largely composed of film teachers, students, and academics in fields related to film throughout the world. Let's go through the steps in subscribing to Screen-L.

* Create an e-mail message addressed to: LISTSERV@UA1VM.UA.EDU

* Leave the subject line blank.

* Write on the first line of the message: Subscribe Screen-L [your name].

* Send the e-mail message.

The program that receives the message then reads the first line of the message, subscribes you and adds your name to the list. You will immediately receive an acknowledgement that you have been added to Screen-L, along with some additional information about how to manage correspondence with the list. Soon after you receive this acknowledgement, you will start receiving all the notes that are sent to the group. And you can begin to participate in the group's discussions too.

The University of Karlstad Film Studies program, aided by Eric Thomas, started Sweden's, and most likely the world's, first international discussion group for film students in November 1994. Hopefully this will lead to more international contacts for the department, and assist us in the facilitation of exchange programs. More universities should consider the discussion group as a learning aid and complement to normal classroom instruction. It's a great way to discuss ideas, and keep track of class participation in distance education.

Usenet News

USENET is a network that supports the News, thousands of discussion groups that can be read like bulletin boards. Messages are posted to the news group, and generate replies; a thread is a collection of messages and replies on the same subject. Not all academic sites support the NEWS, and even those that do may censor some of the more bizarre or sexually controversial groups. Other services, like ClariNet, a commercial news service with full-text capabilities from news feeds from services like AP, Reuters, and the like are provided at a fee, and are available by subscription.

According to Dave Overoye there are more than 6,000 newsgroups available.[4] When you log onto the local news service and get a list of all the groups available at your site, you may choose which groups you are interested in following. The groups are listed under different headings and have naming conventions that link the words with periods instead of spaces after each word. Each heading has a meaning, and the short explanations for the headings below is taken from Everybody's Guide to the Internet, published electronically by the EFF- Electronic Frontier Foundation and available on the Internet.[5]

alt                   Controversial or unusual topics; not carried by all sites
bionet                Research biology
bit.listserv          Conferences originating as Bitnet mailing lists
biz                   Business
comp                  Computers and related subjects
misc                  Discussions that don't fit anywhere else
news                  News about Usenet itself
rec                   Hobbies, games and recreation
sci                   Science other than research biology
soc                   "Social" groups, often ethnically relate
talk                  Politics and related topics

Alt. and rec. are the places you will find most of the newsgroups dealing with film. Some discussion lists are also available as newsgroups, such as Screen-L, which is called bit.listserv.screen-l. Some of the more interesting Usenet groups for individuals interested in film, television and media studies are listed at the end of the article.

It is difficult to lead people through newsgroup software since there are many different software types. Once logged on, you can then browse through the thousands of newsgroup titles and test any that look interesting by reading the latest posts listed. Most software enables you to save lists of the ones you wish to read regularly, so that the newsgroup reading software will automatically fetch the latest postings for you.

Finger

The Finger program on UNIX and VAX machines enables you to find out more information on a certain person through something called a .plan file. Try this by logging onto a UNIX or VAX machine and writing: finger bert.deivert@munin.dc.hks.se Below is what the results of the inquiry look like from my UNIX machine. As you see, there is a little information about my name and address.

[bertd@munin]/home/popu/bertd> finger bertd@munin.dc.hks.se
[munin.dc.hks.se]
Login name: bertd                     In real life: Bert Deivert
Directory: /home/popu/bertd           Shell: /bin/ksh
On since apr 01 08:59:01 on pts/1
from raxp3.ppp.hks.se

This is information about me that is stored on the computer MUNIN that takes care of our e-mail service. Some universities provide extensive information in this regard; sometimes you can find out such useful information as mailing address, home address, home telephone and office telephone numbers for people you need to get in touch with. I recently got film scholar David Bordwell's address by using Finger on the University of Wisconsin computer. At that time he did not have an e-mail address, but this particular university logs students and faculty addresses on the computer, and I was able to get his office address and phone number. This is publicized information, just like a phone book. Below is the exact transcript for a very recent Bordwell inquiry which included e-mail address..

[bertd@munin]/home/popu/bertd> finger bordwell@wisc.edu
[wisc.edu]
qi> 101: query bordwell
102:There was 1 match to your request.
-200:1:         name: BORDWELL DAVID J
-200:1:        e-mail: BORDWELL@FACSTAFF.WISC.EDU
-200:1:      address: 821 UNIV AVE MADISON, WI 53706
-200:1:     building: VILAS COMMUNICATION HALL 6039
-200:1:        phone: 608-262-7723
-200:1:        title: PROFESSOR
-200:1:     division: COLLEGE OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE
-200:1:   department: COMMUNICATION ARTS
-200:1:       title2: PROFESSOR
-200:1:    division2: COLLEGE OF LETTERS AND SCIENCE
-200:1:  department2: HUMANITIES - INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH
200:Ok.

To use Finger for a person, use their last name and the name of the computer where the information should be stored. If you have the right computer name you will get a list of possible people with the same last name, possible e-mail addresses and more. If you don't know the computer name, sometimes it will be enough with the domain and country, as it was in the inquiry above. If you have their complete e-mail address, just use the whole thing. Sometimes this will not work though, as in the case of trying Bert.Deivert@hks.se, which is an alias of a real address which is bertd@munin.dc.hks.se. You will get better results with my first or last name instead. Remember that not all computers allow finger access.

Telnet

Telnet is a program that allows remote login to another computer in the next room or on the other side of the planet. Telnet runs off the local host computer that you log onto, or you may use a tool like the telnet program written by the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) for Macintosh computers. This requires a direct link to the Internet over an Ethernet network. To use telnet, you just write in the address or IP (Internet protocol) number of the computer you wish to access.

Since our library does not have indexes for foreign periodicals, I have found a way to let students and faculty access information on a large amount of popular and scientific articles in journals and magazines through CARL (The Colorado Alliance of Research Libraries). CARL offers searches in many associated libraries, but my favorite service is UnCover, which allows you to search for available articles with the capability to add words to narrow your search.

UnCover lets you access as user for free, but if get your own password and account, you can order any articles you find in the database to be delivered to you by fax. The cost averages to about $11. This can be an economic alternative when the cost of ordering from foreign libraries is prohibitive or excessive personnel resources are needed to facilitate orders.

To access UnCover, run the telnet program and specify it to open the connection to PAC.CARL.ORG and log in as PAC (which is public access), then go into the system till you get to this prompt:

         1. UnCover--Article access & document delivery--No password required
         2. OPEN ACCESS Databases--No password required
         3. LICENSED Databases--Restricted access
         4. CARL System Library Catalogs--No password required
         5. FAQ--Frequently Asked Database Questions
       *99. UnCover EXPRESS (Articles available in 1 Hour)

Choose 1, and keep hitting the carriage return at all prompts about passwords, profiles and the like till you get to the database.

The telnet program can be used for a number of logins done on archie servers, gophers, library systems, and World Wide Web text-based clients. Here are a few examples of telnet addresses at the prompt by the UNIX computer. On a local client like a Macintosh computer you would use the menu command Open Connection and then write in the address.

epix> telnet library.mit.edu

epix> telnet basun.sunet.se

epix> telnet archie.funet.fi

epix> telnet purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888

Once you are logged on to the remote computer, read the directions after the login. Always use a carriage return after writing in a command word or address, unless it says otherwise in the instruction you receive online. Don't use the caps lock key either, since it sometimes sends out confusing characters to the server being called. It is better not to use capital letters since it is not necessary for the computer to understand the address or word.

Gopher

Gopherspace is a searchable, cataloged, virtual space containing files of various types. The gopher program burrows, figuratively, through the space to obtain what you want. You can navigate through catalogs and file folders on remote computers, and do searches for files having a certain word in their titles. You may telnet into some public access gophers, use gopher on your local UNIX machine as your starting point, or run it directly from your desk computer and out on the Internet if you have a direct line out with Macintosh programs like Gopher and Turbogopher or using the web browser you prefer.

After finding an interesting gopher area, you may investigate the files there and download them to your computer for reading and saving as text files. There are any number of film files located in various gopherspaces. Gophers also have links to other gophers with interesting information; follow these links and see what you find. You can then make note of spaces you wish to visit again.

To use gophers by way of a web browser, write the address in the LOCATION section of Netscape. You may also choose OPEN LOCATION in the menu. The advantage to using a web browser for gophers is the easily navigable hierarchy and not having to use a login or password. Try the following Swedish gopher. gopher://basun.sunet.se/

You might want to try the following test using telnet, or by using Netscape - gopher://panda.uiowa.edu/. For using telnet, do this: telnet panda.uiowa.edu, login as gopher, choose General Information first, then Information on Video Laserdiscs. After that you can backtrack and browse around looking at files and different computer and university sites all over the world. Below is an approximation of what the main part of the screen looks when logging in.

Page 1 of 1                      Panda (v 1.5)                 Not Logged In

Public Panda Login (chop.isca.uiowa.edu)

 Welcome to the Panda system at the University of Iowa

Enter terminal type ('help' for help, RETURN=vt220):


    Welcome to Panda at the University of Iowa.  For a quick listing of more
help, type a question mark (?) and press return or enter.  For a longer help
listing, type "help" and press return.


-->   1.  About Panda...
      2.  General Information...
      3.  Iowa City Information...
      4.  Online Information Services...
      5.  University of Iowa Information...
      6.  Johnson County Government Information...

You choose alternative 2, then hit carriage return, thereby coming to the next screen (shown below), where you choose alternative 6. Later you may just browse and connect to anything that interests you. navigation is by typing number lines or using arrow keys to navigate.

--> 1. UseNet News...
2. Library of Congress Information...
3. NIH Libraries...
4. Star Trek Reviews...
5. White House on the Networks
6. Information on Video Laserdiscs...
7. Subject Tree of All Gopher Information...
8. Academe This Week...
9. Internet RFC (Requests for Comments)...
10. The Online Books...
11. Experimental WBachman List of Services...
12. National Science Foundation Metacenter...
13. Library of Congress Database...
14. Disability and Rehabilitation Resources...

What's available on gophers? You can find information about the U.S. government, course syllabi, research projects, address systems, libraries, and anything else you might be interested in. There are global search possibilities for all gopherspace by using the Veronica tool available at gopher sites. Look for it in the menus of the site you log onto. Jughead is another search tool that can search a more specific gopherspace, like the sites at a particular university. Information on how to use these tools is available at your particular gopher site. This is what the menu for the Veronica search site at the public access gopher at basun.sunet.se looks like. At the LOGIN prompt, write GOPHER.

Veronica (Search menu items in most of Gopherspace)

--> 1. Search gopherspace using Veronica (SUNET, Sweden) <?>
2. Search gopherspace for GOPHER DIRECTORIES <?>
3. How to compose queries
4. Other veronica servers/

Anonymous Ftp

File transfer protocol (ftp) is a method of moving files from one computer to another. This can be done from your host computer with programs running on the VAX or UNIX systems or on your desktop computer by using special programs like the Macintosh Fetch program or wftp for Windows. Many computers all over the world support anonymous ftp. This enables a user to log on to the computer using ANONYMOUS as the login ID, and then one's e-mail address as the password. This helps systems people keep track of who is using the computer or misusing it. It is good manners to log in using your correct e-mail address.

Lists of computers supporting ftp and giving basic information about what kinds of files are located in its directories are available from any number of sources. The most extensive though is Yanoff's list which can be obtained by ftp or through Web browsers. You can also read the READ.ME or INDEX files found in directories on ftp sites. One method of obtaining Yanoff's list is in the WWW section in the appendix of this paper.

Avoid downloading files from remote computers at peak times for telecommunications traffic. It slows everything down for all users. If I want to download a file from Stanford University in California, I wait until it is in the middle of the night there, and there is less traffic going on. The best thing to do though, if downloading from such a site, is to use a mirror site. This is a computer that basically keeps the same set of files, updated every night when traffic is light. Two mirror sites for SUMEX-AIM.STANFORD.EDU, the popular Stanford shareware Mac site that has the INFO-MAC directory are SUNET.SE in Sweden and FUNET.FI in Finland.

WORLD WIDE WEB- INTERNET EXPLORER AND NETSCAPE

At the moment, the World Wide Web system, which seamlessly integrates hypertext links, gophers, telnet, ftp, sound, digitalized movie clips, and graphics is the most popular and fastest growing area on the NET. The graphic interface clients are the most touted ones, but it is possible to use a text-based client through a telnet connection by logging in as www.

There are several web client programs available but Internet Explorer [6] and Netscape Navigator are my personal favorites. Both web browser programs deal with showing graphics, film files, animations, text and hyperlinks in a similar way. The difference in the two programs has to do with the way PLUG-INS, small programs that are extensions of the original program, and written by third part companies are handled. For example, Microsoft, the publisher of Internet Explorer, has its own plug-in technology called ACTIVE-X, competing with other companies like MacroMedia's SHOCKWAVE which makes plug-ins for both browsers. There are literally hundreds of extensions available, some of them only working with a particular browser. You may run across instructions at a web site informing you that you may need a plug-in to see the information available. Most web sites give a direct hyperlink to the plug-in site so that you may download and install the one needed.

To connect to a site, you just need to write in the URL (uniform resource locater), as listed in the appendix at the end of the article. On Windows or Macintosh interfaces, you may pull down a menu item, which on Netscape for Mac is called Open Location. You then write in the URL, such as that for Paramount Studios: http://www.paramount.com/

Hypertext in the World Wide Web is either marked with a recognizable color--often blue (red or purple for previously used connections)--or underlined. By marking that text with a click or a carriage return, you are then transported to another site somewhere in the world that has been given a link based upon an association with that hypertext (word).

George Landow describes hypertext like this:

Hypertext, in other words, provides an infinitely re-centerable system whose provisional points of focus depends upon the reader, who becomes a truly active reader in yet another sense. One of the fundamental characteristics of hypertext is that it is composed of bodies of linked texts that have no primary axis of organization.[7]

All Web sites have pointers to other sites through hypertext links. By single clicking on the highlighted text in a graphic browser, the URL is put into action and looks up the address of the clicked text. Home pages, as they are called, are the main fare of the Web, showing pictures, text and giving the opportunity to listen to audio and see video. Some sites even offer realtime video images, though slowly updated.

Our university here in Karlstad has a Web server and some students are in the process of putting a virtual tour of the campus with still photographs online. I have published information about our film studies program there during, and include a section called SHOTS IN CYBERSPACE that has links to resources that may be interesting for film students and scholars. Another plan, which may take a while to implement, is to make video clips of student productions available on the server. The compression of such clips and the hard disk space needed are two constraining factors.

Like most major record companies have already done, film production companies are now establishing sites on the Web. These sites provide information about films being marketed by the studios. Production information, pictures, video clips, and biographical materials are available, for the time being, free of charge. The following text is a list of the film companies with sites on the Web as of April 3, 1995 listed on CineMedia in Australia.

Film Companies

Buena Vista (Walt Disney) Pictures
Claddagh Film, Ltd.
Curious Pictures
First Films
MCA/Universal Cyberwalk
MGM/UA - The Lion's Den
New Line Cinema
Primitive Features
Sony Online
Hollyweb Studio Briefing

Clearly, the commercial interests of the media will soon be creating many sites on the Internet. This means that film and media scholars with Internet accounts will have a much easier time trying to contact people directly involved with production. Since these people post things online, they will often post e-mail addresses for direct contact, and the dissemination of information from their offices will be expedited easily through electronic communication. I believe that help and information may be easier to come by using this method, rather than a normal letter of inquiry.

My favorite sites on the Web are SCREENsite, maintained by Jeremy Butler, originator of Screen-L, at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, and Dan Harries' CineMedia site at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. These two projects collect sites dealing with film, media and interesting related topics from all over the Internet and make them available on the World Wide Web.

MediaWeb is an attempt at organizing the film, tv, and media sites on the Web. Started recently by Jeremy Butler and associates, this is an admirable attempt at creating an intersection of resources for our fields of interest in cinema and media studies. MediaWeb has a discussion list and a Web page. According to the MediaWeb home page:

MediaWeb is a loose coalition of film/TV/video webmasters that seeks to foster collaboration and to minimize the redundancy of materials on film/TV/video sites. MediaWeb is open to all, but it is not really intended for the users of these sites. Rather, it aims to assist film/TV/video webmasters so that they might better coordinate their efforts.

MediaWeb is not a cartel aiming to restrict competition among Web sites. It's inevitable, for instance, that several sites will offer film/TV/video zines that compete for users' attention. MediaWeb is more like a trade association--offering a method for webmasters to support one another. If, for instance, one site creates a comprehensive listing of film schools, there's no reason for three other sites to attempt the same thing.[8]

Hopefully more information and resources on film and media will be made available on the Web by scholars, students, and filmmakers. A database of syllabi, scholarly papers, Cinema Journal online, and other research facilities and contacts would make our lives as film/cinema teachers and researchers a little easier.

The search engines and applications available on the Web are very good in many respects. They range from programs that check a variety of computer sites to see if the search word you specify is a name or keyword of one of the files available, to filtering services that can send you all the files containing a specific word mentioned in one of the thousands of Usenet groups. The easiest way to get started is to use the search page set up with resources at : http://home.mcom.com/home/Internet-search.html

LIVE VIDEO ON THE NET

By using an amazing program called CU-SeeMe, developed at Cornell University, we are now able to receive and transmit live video, albeit at a slow rate, in conjunction with live audio, from one Internet address (IP) to another, and even multiple connections.[9] This video conferencing is only the domain of the few schools and companies on the cutting edge and with enough funding. This process currently costs approximately one hundred thousand dollars, and though this price will undoubtedly fall, it still puts video conferencing off the agenda for most schools.

CU-SeeMe, however, enables anyone with a direct Internet connection to make use of this emerging technology at virtually no cost. The program is available free at many ftp sites all over the world. On October 31, 1994 I was at the CUE (Computer Using Educators) conference in Santa Clara, California and heard Al Rogers, an educator using CU-SeeMe in K12 schools (first to twelfth grades) in America, talk about the Global Schoolhouse Project.[10]

The Project is using video conferencing to link up schools in diverse areas of the US, well-known cultural personalities, scientists, and teachers. Some of the documented meetings have involved a former Surgeon General of the US, the net personality and former MTV video jockey Adam Curry, and grade school children. Through this exchange, students are getting first-hand contact with people working in the real world outside their sphere of knowledge, bringing home the idea of a "global village".

INTERACTIVE DIMENSIONS

What is a MUD? Well, it is a Multi-User-Dungeon, a text-based virtual world similar to Dungeons and Dragons games. MUDs allow for conversations and interaction in real time.There are countless MUDs around, ranging from virtual civilizations to kinky places to meet virtual sex partners. Lists of MUDs and information about them are available on the NET. One fast way is to link up to a MUD information page through the South-East Ohio Free Net or try the MUD info page through a Web client. http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~lwl/mudinfo.html.

MOOs are MUDs but with object oriented programming available. Objects described in the world may be used in a literal way through programming, such as a train that will take you to a specific site within the MOO. Since exploring MUDs and MOOs takes a significant amount of time, and I have devoted my NET time to other endeavors, I can only tell you about the one MOO I have logged onto now and then, and one which I believe offers contacts and intellectual stimulation for film and media researchers, Media-MOO.

Media-MOO, an object oriented but text based virtual space configured on the idea of the Internet and run out of MIT- in Boston, Massachusetts, is a place for media researchers to interact with each other. To log onto the MOO as a guest, use the TELNET program for the following address: purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888

Media-MOO is a bit complicated to learn and can be confusing to the beginner, but after a few hours of logging in, most people should be able to make their way to places of interest. This MOO is a virtual world with mailboxes, newspapers, voting rights, lectures, entertainment areas, hangouts, and much more. One example of how the MOO is used is by the media and communications department at Stockholm University. JMK, the acronym for the Swedish title of the department, has its own space, including a coffee room, lecture hall and offices for various instructors. One may log on to the MOO, wander over to JMK, and discuss media politics with international colleagues. Like any world or country, modes of behavior and etiquette must be mastered to get by, but there is a help mode and documentation available for many of the commands.

MOOs and MUDs are found all over the Internet in one form or another, but the Media-MOO is one of the most interesting academic uses of this virtual world form. Greg Ulmer, author of Teletheory and a number of other books on cultural theory, lectured in August of 1994 at the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Helsinki.[11] Ulmer described his implementation of a MOO at the University of Florida to teach the students how to use the computer system. The methodology and application of MOOs and other forms of virtual communication should be considered an important part of the pedagogical future of cinema studies.[12]

CONCLUSION

It does take time to wander throughout the Internet, but the time invested is well worth it, if only for the enjoyment of meeting other people out there with similar interests. The Internet also brings closer the dream of a global village.

RECOMMENDED READING

At the moment, there are many books being published about the Internet. On a recent visit to a major book store in Berkeley, California, I spied about 15 brand new titles on the bookstands. It is impossible for me to keep up on Internet publishing, since much of it occurs in periodicals and books that are not exclusively concerned with the Internet, such as mainstream magazines that now have sections devoted to the Internet and cyberspace. Some of the books and magazines I can recommend include:

Paul Gilster, Finding It On the Internet (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1994).

Harley Hahn and Rick Stout, The Internet Yellow Pages (Berkeley: Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1995).

Brendan Kehoe, Zen and the Art of Internet (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1994).

Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (London: Secker and Warburg,1994).

Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, The Mondo 2000 User's Guide To the New Edge (New York: Harper Collins,1993).

APPENDIX

RESOURCES AND SITES:

E-MAIL ADDRESSES

bert.deivert@hks.se             Bert Deivert
cyberprof@igc.apc.org           Howard Frederick; ask about obtaining
                                the materials for his course Cyberresearch and Global
                                Internetworking
nightdave@aol.com               You can order the Internet video here
comserve@vm.its.rpi.edu         Comserve communications research net,
                                send message HELP for information
movie@ibmpcug.co.uk             send message HELP for database info

FINGER

finger deivert@munin.dc..hks.se                Bert Deivert

Various TELNET services

info.anu.edu.au                 login library, for library services
library.mit.edu                 MIT's library system
locis.loc.gov                   Library of Congress(type help after
                                login)
nic.csu.net                     login libs, for libraries
pac.carl.org                    library databases/UnCover article
                                searches
garcon.cso.uiuc.edu 625         another way to CARL and other
                                databases
panda.uiowa.edu                 choose General Information/Information
                                on Video Laserdiscs
rsl.ox.ac.uk                    login hytelnet, for library services
info.ccit.arizona.edu           login hytelnet, for library services
seorf.ohiou.edu                 South East Ohio Regional Free-Net, login
                                as guest

Public access GOPHERS via telnet (use a site near you)

gopher.unc.edu                   login gopher        (US)
gopher.uv.es                     login gopher        (Spain)
info.anu.edu.au                  login info         (Australia)
basun.sunet.se                   login gopher        (Sweden)
panda.uiowa.edu                  login gopher        (US)
pubgopher.msu.edu                login gopher        (US)

FTP

nic.funet.fi                         movie reviews in /pub/culture/movies
                                     directory, ALSO electronic books in /pub/doc/etext
rtfm.mit.ed                          FAQs in /pub/usenet/news.answers
                                     directory
ftp.unt.edu                          in the pub/library directory is a file on
                                     libraries on the Internet
src.doc.ic.ac.uk                     large software archive for many
                                     types of machines
archive.umich.edu                    large software collections, faqs, and
                                     more
sumex-aim.stanford.edu               large software collections, faqs, and
                                     more
ftp.nisc.sri.com                     list of mailing lists in /netinfo/interest-groups
                                     directory
ocf.berkeley.edu                     parodies of popular movies and tv
                                     shows in directory /pub/Library/Parodies
 

MOOs for research via telnet

155.31.1.1 8888                         Diversity University MOO
jhm.ccs.neu.edu 1709                    Jay's House MOO
lambda.parc.xerox.com 8888              LambdaMOO
purple-crayon.media.mit.edu 8888        MediaMOO

Alexander Cohen's CINEMASPACE: http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/

American Communication Associaton WWW server- Film Studies: http://www.uark.edu/~aca/studies/film.html

ARC INDEX, ART AND CULTURE: http://tatlin.arc.co.uk/main.arc

Bright Lights Film Journal: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/

The Chronicle of Higher Education: Cinema Sites by David Augsburger: http://www.cinema-sites.com/

CTHEORY: http://www.ctheory.com

Dermatology in the cinema: http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~vcr/Dermcin.html

Entertainment Weekly magazine: E-Zine Directory: http://www.ezine-dir.com/

Film Feature Forum - European article digest for academics: http://gewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/~puntigam/FFF/

Film and media related sites in Canada: http://www.film.queensu.ca/Links/StudyLinks.html

Filmmaker resources: http://www.filmmaker.com/

FLICKER- independent, underground film: http://www.hi-beam.net/cgi-bin/flicker.pl

Hong Kong Movies Home Page: http://www.kowloonside.com/

HotWired - Wired magazine's Web site: http://www.wired.com/

Internet Movie Database: http://uk.imdb.com

Int'l Association for Media & History: http://www.iamhist.org/

Macintosh and PC computer shareware archive: http://www.shareware.com

Mailing List (discussion groups) Directory: http://www.liszt.com

Movie Reviews By Edwin Jahiel : http://www.prairienet.org/ejahiel

MUD resource collection: http://www.clock.org/muds/

Northwestern University Production page: http://www.communication.northwestern.edu/rtf/

Postmodern Culture electronic journal: http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/

Professor Neon's TV and Movie Mania: http://www.vortex.com/ProfNeon.html

ScreenSite- collection of film resources on the Internet:
http://www.screensite.org/link-2.html

Serials in Cyberspace: http://www.uvm.edu/~bmaclenn/

Search pages: http://www.altavista.com/

Senses of Cinema: http://haze.customer.netspace.net.au/theory.htm

Resources for Screenwriters : http://www.writerswrite.com/screenwriting/scrnlink.htm

Yahoo collection- Entertainment-movies and films: http://dir.yahoo.com/Entertainment/Movies_and_Film/Filmmaking/

SOME USENET GROUPS

alt.vampyres
alt.asian-movies
alt.cult-movies
alt.cult-movies.rocky-horror
alt.fan.monty-python
alt.fan.woody-allen
alt.horror
alt.simpsons
alt.tv.x-files
alt.twin-peaks
alt.video.laserdisc
news.answers (for frequently asked questions about newsgroups)
rec.arts.animation
rec.arts.anime
rec.arts.movies
rec-arts.sf.movies
rec.arts.sf.starwars

SOME DISCUSSION LISTS

ANIME-L                 Japanese animation
CINEMA-L                popular film discussions
CJMOVIES                criminal justice in movies
FILM-L                  different points of view about cinema
FILMUS-L                film music
H-FILM                  film, tv, radio and AV materials in teaching
MEDIA-L                 media discussions and practical tips
MEDIAWEB                Web sites for media and film
ONLINE-L                what is happening with online services
ROSEBUD                 international discussion group for film students
SCREEN-L                academic film discussions
SCRNWRIT                screenwriting discussion
VIDPRO-L                professional video production

Notes

[]

¹ John R. Levine and Carol Baruodi, The Internet for Dummies (Indianapolis: IDG Books, 1993), 32.

[]

² William Dickson and Adam Engst, Internet Explorer Kit for Macintosh (Indianapolis: Hayden Books, 1994), 211

[]

³ For a very good explanation of this, see Chapter 4 of Harley Hahn and Rick Stout, The Internet Complete Reference (Berkeley: Osborne McGraw-Hill, 1994).

[]

⁴ Dave Overoye, The Video Guide to the Internet (1994). E-mail: nightdave@aol.com

[]

⁵ Electronic Frontier Foundation, Everybody's Guide to the Internet (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1994), 44.

[6]Read more about Mosaic and its creators in Wired (October 1994), 116.

[]

⁷ George P. Landow, Hypertext : the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 11.

[]

⁸ MediaWeb page http://www.sa.ua.edu/tcf/mw/join.htm

[]

⁹ Download the program by using URL ftp://gated.cornell.edu/pub/video/html/Welcome.html

[]

¹⁰ Global Schoolhouse Project home page http://k12.cnidr.org/gsh/gshwelcome.html

[]

¹¹ Check Greg Ulmer's Web pages. http://www.ucet.ufl.edu/~gulmer/

[]

¹² For more info about MUDs and MOOs, read chapter five of Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community (London: Secker and Warburg,1994).