Robert Fripp on 'Ethical Bootlegging' (August 1979)

RG: Are you opposed to people bootlegging...
RF: Yes.
RG: ...your performances?
RF: Yes. People who turn up to Frippertronics concerts need only bring their ears. They need have responsibility to nothing else but their ears. If they're not prepared to get involved in the spirit of what is trying to be created there, they really shouldn't come, and I don't say that in any callous way at all. If the idea is to come along to take photographs, this is not the idea of a music concert. This is a peculiar custom that one should listen to music through the lense of a camera and I don't like being put in a situation where the sound, the atmosphere is being punctured by theft. I understand that on the subject of bootlegging there is this notion that it's preserving music which is perhaps of some value to other people and all those other vague notions. When I recieve the traditional proportion of royalties which a record makes from all the different bootlegs and notice that the ... whoever wrote the music is getting their proportion as well, I shall perhaps look on bootlegging, the... if you like...the so-called public-spirited bootlegging, in a different way. Were I a bootlegger, I would deduct a portion of the royalties for the artist and the writer and send them off anonymously. That's what I should do. I know of no one yet who does that so my suspicions of bootleggers and their motives remain. In fact I've just obtained the address of a man who, against all my requests, bootlegged the Kitchen concert in New York and I'm considering exactly what to do. You see, the traditional approach is that three very large burly men go around and inflict a considerable amount of muscular and organic damage upon the body of the person who's bootlegged this and destroy a lot of material objects. That's not my approach. But I don't like having the idea of working through the traditional dinosaur structure of copyright law and so on but I sense that I may have to do it because in a situation where normal requests from one human being to another in a very straightforeward way, where this isn't met by a decent and honorable response, one is violated and that situation simply can't go on. And it's such a pity that a very, very small proportion of people have led, for example, to increased security at airports throughout the world which make traveling now, for me, personally, almost intolerableand in terms of performance situations the point is that within two and a half years, we shall all be frisked when we go to a rock 'n' roll event...
Via
(Thanx Fred!)