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We're going to shift gears now into a movie that seems a little more straightforward as a documentary, and that would be Sonic Outlaws. Where did that project begin?

I was at this spoken word event. Because I had had a little bit of luck with Tribulation 99, I was asked to talk about this new form, collage essay. I was on the same bill as Don Joyce, this guy in Negativland. He read this thing and it was a thunderbolt. He read the essay, which he published on a CD and which is in the book The Letter U and the Numeral 2. Well anyway, it was about the need to draw from the archive. In his case, it was sound. Audio. I realized - first of all, his thinking was unassailable, just brilliant arguments - I realized I was doing the same thing that they were doing.

I always liked Negativland. I didn't know them personally, they were from the East Bay and I was from San Francisco. They were kind of nerdy types. Maybe I was a nerd, too, but the thing is, all of a sudden I saw that what they were doing wasn't just, you know, wanking, and it wasn't necessarily theory-driven. They were doing it because they loved it. Just like me, I love cinema, and they loved playing with sound.

They were actually in a very major way engaging with history, and they took the fall. I knew it. When they got hit by Island Records with the lawsuit, it's a perfect story. Let's face it. It was too good to be true, but it was true. And it resonated out. It was something that would have to do with everything I did, and everything you do by the way, in our entire lives, and that is the issue of sharing information. Intellectual property. What's going to go on now with libraries, with copyright, movies, culture and media.

So it was the case against Negativland that inspired the movie.

I didn't want to make a fanzine about how Negativland was being victimized, but this is a practice that crosses cultures. It's also about critique. It's also about collaboration. It's also about subcultural practice, like the so-called networking movement, as it was called in the 80s or early 90s. About zines. About correspondence art. What the Tape Beatles were doing. So I started interviewing all these other people.

I just added one to the other to the other, so the whole thing is set up as kind of a - it is feature-length, but it doesn't really have much of an arc, because there's just a series of interviews with Emergency Broadcast Network, Alan Korn, John Oswald, Negativland, there might be two or three others in there. And that was how it was put together.

How do you feel the idea and understanding of Fair Use has changed since making the documentary, because that was in '96 or so.

Great question, and I just told you two seconds ago [laughs]. The meteor was approaching at the speed of light, you know. Don't look up. I don't know you, but I'll share this: I have no hope. My prospects for the future are very, very dim. What we've all seen, and you know as well as I, is this absolutely egregious privatization of the public sphere. Certainly, on a legal level, things are much more restrictive now.

They're moving in on us, that's for sure. They're closing the public commons. I feel on the defensive. That could be one good sound bite. I feel restricted. I just hope there's enlightened souls and forces and maybe institutions that could maybe hold them back from totally eating up everything that is due us, or our common cultural legacies, our libraries, our archives.

I'm wondering, with the DVD releases - now you're selling pieces that do appropriate other people's stuff. Has that been an issue? Were there "clearance issues" that you had to deal with?

Okay, that is a very fair question for you to ask. That is a very reasonable question, but I don't think I can give you a very good answer to that. What I mean is, it's not the kind of thing that I would like to make a big deal out of, because I would just be making a target out of myself. We consider it Fair Use, and if we had to go to court with it, we could probably prove that it was. But we don't want to go to court, and we might be below the radar. I don't feel this violates any moral things. It is borderline as far as the law goes, but I would rather say less about it, to be honest with you.

In the meantime, what's happened is all the audio [from the Negativland album] has been released. You can get it off the net. For free. So it's absurd. The whole situation was totally constructed for whatever legal reasons, and a certain amount of time passed and you can get it. An original record is worth over $100 if you go to your record store, and you can find it in many record stores, U2 by Negativland, because there were so many that they weren't able to destroy. So it is kind of a footnote in music history. The point is, it was an opportunity to raise the issues, and I seized on it.

It actually turned out good for Negativland - I hope that doesn't sound cavalier - in terms of their own career, because they totally leveled themselves with U2. "These guys are looking bad, and we're looking like David and Goliath," kind of thing. That's the film, you know? It's punkish. It's for the little guy. It doesn't solve any of these problems.

That's a problem with that film, by the way: It's all one-sided. There should be more discussion from people who represent the industry.

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