The Minute Memes project: reframing copyright restrictions one idea at a time, through a series of short, captivating, classroom-ready videos by award-winning artist and animator Nina Paley.
Minute Memes
Minute Memes: Reframing Copyright One Idea At a Time
Update: three of the Minute Memes are now being supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; see the announcement for more information.
What are the Minute Memes?
The Minute Memes project is a series of one-minute videos about copyright restrictions and artistic freedom, made by award-winning animator Nina Paley.
The series is meant to counteract widely-available videos from the recording and publishing industries that seek to frame copyright as natural property right. Anecdotal evidence indicates that there is already demand: people are looking for responses to some of those industry videos (for one example, see here).
The Minute Memes will offer an intellectual framework to constituencies prepared to consider copyright reform — people whose activities cause them to question copyright restrictions that had previously seemed normal. Step by step, the series will build a new frame of reference to supplant received rhetoric about copyright (received rhetoric such as the notion of "balancing" the needs of creators and the public, which assumes that the two are in opposition; the idea that copying is a form of stealing; the idea that control of copying must be bound up with attribution; etc).
The Minute Memes will use visual storytelling backed by written supplementary materials to show how art, artists, and audiences can thrive in a permissive and non-monopoly-based environment.
Motivation: Why Minute Memes?
Due largely to ubiquitous, professionally-made public campaigns by the recording and publishing industries, many people — even those who share music online — identify unauthorized copying with stealing and with plagiarism. It is difficult to go from that frame of mind to one receptive to the notion that the freedom to share, and the freedom to create derivative works, might be civil rights. One must first accept that, for example, "editing a copy without the original author's permission" is not the same as "destroying someone's hard work".
Before a new way of thinking can be presented, then, the issues must be reframed. We must enable the viewer to feel that formerly unquestioned terms and assumptions deserve a fresh look. Only after crossing that emotional barrier will someone be willing to consider copyright in a new way. But crossing that kind of barrier requires rhetorical tools that go beyond plain expository argument. For someone to consider ideas they may have previously felt were unrealistic or even immoral, they need to first give themselves permission — they must feel it's safe to go there.
The Minute Memes project will help build that mental permission structure. This involves making rigorous arguments, but also sending extra-rational signals: compelling anecdotes, memorable images and music, high aesthetic standards and overall production quality. We need to match or exceed the production values of the copyright industry's campaigns, while simultaneously having a message that better fits how people actually want to treat copyable and remixable content.
Supplementary Materials:
Along with the videos, we will also offer supplementary materials and guidance to encourage specific venues to show Minute Memes: for example, before a screening or broadcast of a film whose distribution has been interfered with by copyright restrictions, as part of college documentary film classes, etc. But we also intend the memes to spread virally, by being entertaining and by resonating with people's increasingly everyday behavior regarding filesharing and remixing. All the memes will be released online under open copyrights, so they can be shared freely and used in other works.
Key attributes:
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Short.
Each video will be 30 seconds to one minute long. Since people can see the length before they decide whether or not to play a video, keeping the videos short lowers the mental investment required, and thus makes people more likely to click the play button. It also allows the videos to be easily used as introductions or followups to other works.
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Professionally produced.
The videos will be produced by Nina Paley, award-winning cartoonist and animator. Nina Paley has exactly the right kind of creativity, artistic vision, and technical skill to produce the Minute Memes. She also has a personal committment to copyright reform: her most recent feature-length film, "Sita Sings The Blues", was blocked from distribution (despite tremendous audience success at one-off screenings) because of copyright restrictions on the music in the film, songs recorded in the late 1920s by singer Annette Hanshaw.
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One issue per video.
Reframing is best done one bit at a time — asking a viewer to re-examine every assumption at once would only result in mental lock-up. See the series plan for more.
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Thematic linkage.
Although each individual video will stand alone, they will be thematically linked so the progression fits together as a coherent argument.
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Audience contributions solicited and used.
As we'll be announcing the subtopics well ahead of time, other people may try their hand, contributing ideas, music, or even their own videos. We will not only encourage this, we may include the best material directly in the series, if they meet the production standards. We will maintain public comment boards where we can see audience reactions and solicit suggestions. Most importantly, we will release all the Minute Memes under a free license that permits derivative works.
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Text accompaniments provided.
For those who want to delve deeper, each Minute Meme will be accompanied by a prose document, providing history and explanations to go along with the video, and references for any factual claims made in the video. Each Minute Meme will have a stable, uniquely-identifying URL at which both the video and its accompanying material can be obtained for educational purposes.
Series Plan:
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Show how stealing a bicycle is different from sharing a song. (Nina says: "let's work pirates in there somehow".)
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All Creative Work Is Derivative
The title says it all.
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Copying Is Not Plagiarism
Show how making a copy of someone's work is not the same as taking credit for its authorship. (E.g., when teenagers download songs from the Internet, they don't replace the artists' name with their own; in fact, they want to share it under the artists' name so they can easily find people with similar musical tastes. It is only fear of copyright infringement suits that causes them to obscure such information.)
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How Artists Really Make Their Livings
Contrast the copyright industry myth of the artist-as-entrepreneur with the reality of everyday artists' lives and the economics of their art. (Use our footage of musician Bob Ostertag showing off his one-cent royalty checks.)
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Origins of Copyright
Show how copyright actually got started (as a printing-industry regulation descended from a censorship statute). Contrast this with the received notion of artists and writers somehow rising up and demanding "protection" from some never-quite-named danger.
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How Copyright Gets Extended
Show the process by which the copyright industry builds on mythical notions of how artists make a living and of the origins of copyright to convince legislatures to extend and expand copyright legislation. Maybe show bogus uses of the "balance" metaphor.
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Audiences Are Active — Culture Is Something We Do Together
Show what art looks like when audiences are free to participate.
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How Decentralized Distribution Works
A visual explanation of how a truly free work spreads, and how this treats artists and audiences.
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Strangers in the Street Explain Copyright
A revised version of our "person in the street" interviews: show new interviews with alleged random people in the street who explain what copyright is really about. For example, we stop a biker in mid-ride and ask her to describe her understanding of copyright, and she says "Oh, it's a monopoly system designed to subsidize centralized mechanical distribution methods, such as the printing press in the late sixteenth century. ..."
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Copyright and Freedom of Speech
Show examples of how copyright is used as a tool of censorship (there are so many of these that it's a matter of choosing which are most compelling).
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What Rights Clearance Actually Looks Like
Show what the process of "negotiating" with the holder of a monopoly right really looks like: the artist wishing to use pre-existing works has no negotiating power at all, and must either take or leave the terms dictated by the rights owner.
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Reverse Copyright Notices
Offer replacements for the familiar (and legally misleading) FBI warnings displayed at the beginning of U.S. DVDs. These "reverse notices" would talk about how you can share and re-use the work. This would be offered in both still and animated versions. The animated version might start out with the traditional notice, which then gets swarmed by miniature people who would not just erase the old notice and replace it with the new one, but actually rearrange it — "edit" it — to form the new words, to show how the freedoms are contained within the old terms if one simply removes the negative restrictions.
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Free Licenses Preserve Rights
Terry Hancock's idea for a meme. He says:
"Using a free-license lets you keep your rights in your work"
That's right — exactly the opposite of what many people think. The thing is, many proprietary publishers want to buy exclusive rights to your work — all of them, leaving you with no control over what happens to it. How many artists and authors have you heard say "I wish I could give that away, but my publisher won't let me"?
[...]
Using a free license means giving up the ability to restrict other people from copying your work — but it also makes it impossible for any of them to restrict you. Seen the other way around, a free license means keeping the ability to use your work any way you want, while letting others do the same.
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"You do what you want with your copies, I do what I want with mine."
Nina said: "You do what you want with your copies, I do what I
want with mine" is a very simple concept, but shockingly radical.A persistent theme of pro-restriction rhetoric is "the author
should have the right to choose what happens with the work". The best
response is to get away from the idea of "the work" as a single object
(since it's not), and instead focus on the objects people are actually
interacting with: their copies. E.g., you're not trying to tell the
author what to do with her copies, so why should she get to tell you
what to do with yours?
Additional memes suggested since the first series of 12 went up:
Budget:
DRAFT: THESE NUMBERS ARE NOT FINAL
We are budgeting a cost-per-minute of $10,000, which is in the low-to-medium end of the spectrum for professional quality animation with sound and music. The overall cost-per-minute for modern professional animation ranges from $3000.00 to over $1,000,000.00:
| Space Ghost: Coast to Coast (2000) | $3,301.40/min | ||
| South Park (series) (2006) | $11,363.64/min | ||
| The Simpsons (2000) | $55,023.27/min | ||
| Howl's Moving Castle (2004) | $211,864.41/min | ||
| Curious George (2006) | $581,395.35/min | ||
| Treasure Planet (2002) | $1,678,262.42/min |
(Source: Animation Budget History at cartoons.captaincapitalism.com/animgraph/animgraph.html; figures adjusted for inflation.)
Minute Memes budget breakdown:
| Animation production [1] | $120,000 (12 memes @ $10,000/meme) | ||
| Researching, writing accompanying texts | $12,000 ($1,000/meme) | ||
| Music and sound design | $36,000 ($3,000/meme avg) | ||
| Equipment [2] | $3,000 | ||
| Publicity; audience identification | $5,000 | ||
| Web site, operating expenses | $2,000 |
Total: $178,000
[1] Animation production expenses include: animator's fee, office space, creation of broadcast-quality output masters, DVD authoring, messenger fees, and animation production expenses (storyboarding, character development, test scenes, etc).
[2] Equipment expenses are primarily computers, and hard drives for transporting large digital video files. Equipment is listed separately from animation production because it's a one-time expense: the same equipment will be used for all the Memes.
Building Transformative Constituencies:
Coordinating the Minute Memes with Other Projects.
QuestionCopyright.org focuses on building "transformative constituencies": groups of people with a specific shared interest in loosening copyright restrictions. By facilitating the expression of that interest, and linking disparate groups together in awareness of a common problem, we can increase the chances of legal reform while at the same time creating a parallel system outside copyright law. When artists and distributors voluntarily choose non-monopolistic distribution methods, they chip away at default assumptions about copyright, and at copyright law itself (even civil disobedience becomes unnecessary when people simply route around the law rather than break it).
Examples of such constituencies include: authors whose works go out of print even while their publishers retain the monopoly; bar owners who have had to stop offering live music because of restrictions by blanket licensing agencies; educators who can't get access to materials for their students; etc.
The Minute Memes will provide a valuable "glue" for linking these constituencies together and showing each what they all have in common.
For example, the Sita Distribution Project aims to demonstrate to independent film-makers and other artists that they can do better by simply letting their works circulate freely on the Internet and letting the benefits flow back to them via the same route — that they have more to gain from this model than from traditional centralized distributorship, in which they sign away most of their rights while cutting off a large part of their potential audience. Not only do many artists struggle to find distributors, those who do find one are often unhappy with what they get.
At the same time, many artists are frustrated with the rights clearance process. But because the burden of clearing pre-existing works is usually borne in isolation — when the clearance process fails, the new work is simply not released, and thus is not tinder for common discussion — artists often do not fully connect that frustration with the centralized distribution system as a whole.
By providing a coherent intellectual framework that unifies these ideas in small, digestible steps, the Minute Memes will help us bring together those different interest groups. For example, if some members of both groups see the Rights Clearance meme, the Decentralized Distribution meme, and the Origins of Copyright meme, they will be more likely to see the link between the two phenomena, and when offered an alternative, will be more likely to try it.
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Re: Minute Memes
Regarding Nina's comments in her recent "Command Line" interview about not receiving "muse guidance" on "Copying Is Not Plagiarism" and also "The Problem is Monopolies (Not Commerce)" and the idea that the memes might not all get funded...
You might want to approach this from the direction of what you feel inspired about first, rather than what you think is "most important". Someone else may feel inspiration about the ones that don't work for you.
It's possible that they may want to step up to the plate on some of the memes.
I had originally imagined that Question Copyright was going to have an open call for Minute Memes and that Nina was just going to do some of them. That's still a possible model you might want to consider -- maybe you don't have to do them in strict order of "social importance". (This seemed natural to me, because it's the "community-based" approach, which is what I'm used to).
Personally, I would _love_ to see something that clears the mystery over what "NonCommercial" really means (because I personally find that is one of the biggest challenges). I've felt for some time that "NC" was deceptively misnamed -- since the only time it makes sense if you want to sell copies of your work commercially (i.e. in the old/proprietary model). Perhaps "Commercial Monopoly" or "CM" would've made more sense? :-)
(Nina mentioned this as a possible meme in her interview and I think it's a good one. Or at least that we need some meme that addresses the myths around "non-commercial" licenses -- I don't see it here, though, so it's new).
Re: Minute Memes
Well, I think most of the public doesn't know about the non-commercial licenses -- it's inside baseball, really.
Our goal is just to see to it that the Minute Memes get produced, and are high quality. Hence working with Nina Paley! Of course, if someone has a great meme, neither Nina nor QCO would object -- we'd happily use it. But we don't want to count on crowdsourcing in this case -- you've got to have someone who really cares about the issue and has the skills to do it right. The intersection of those two sets is not large.
Nina is approaching them in order of inspiration, it turns out. We just change the series order after the fact to reflect whatever order she does them in :-).
Re: Minute Memes
Look, what I'm suggesting is something like your first MM, CINT, only with maybe 6 mice this time, and they start out different iconic critters and then borrow body parts as before but don't end up looking like the Red Army marching through Red Square (like the current one does, at the end), and instead you have one with a mustache, one with big hair, one that looks like Rembrandt, a Mona Lisa, a Dali, a Picasso cubist, whatever (I think you can do this without paying for the rights to cartoonize, right??) and they mix and match, like a mustache on the Mona Lisa mouse. So that in the end they are ALL richer and different still.
And you could have one guy who is a constant character throughout all the MMs, who represents the content CREATOR, who is creating his stuff off to the side, and people can identify with him, he could become the mascot of MMs. But I think the idea of uniformity is not so good, strikes the wrong nerve somehow. Somehow, we have to get the idea of copying a-la "candles" spreading light -- it's subtle and yet anyone can understand that more light is better and actually we all benefit if we can each contribute a little bit. And duh, if it's illegal to spread the light, then we're all in the dark, which also perfectly illustrates the Moguls M.O. -- and hey, maybe the mascot could be a candle[1]. That hints at "light bulb" going on, at Prometheus, and enlightenment...
--Robert
[1] beware infringement on "Lumiere" in Disney's rendition of the French fable "Beauty and the Beast".
Great!
Only just found this post. It sounds fantastic to me.
Particularly the first two I could see spreading incredibly well (as so many people are so fed up with the monopolists' framing, but aren't sure how to think things through further).
Not sure I like the idea of using actors to do a fake strangers on the street section. Seems contrived and like it would annoy people. Perhaps just short clips of people in the street interviewed, saying something along the industry lines, and then pausing to explain (in a very fact - maybe even statistic - centric way) why this isn't how things actually work.
Perhaps it would make sense for Creative Commons to help fund this? What are your plans re: funding? Donations can certainly play a role, but are you looking at other grants / similar? Glad to see you're planning to apply for the Warhol grant.
- njw
Re: Great
Thanks for reading over these!
We're applying for grants, yup (one application in so far, and we plan to have the Warhol app in before September 1st). But we can *always* use help with grant applications. Grantwriting turns out to be incredibly time consuming. I had no idea until I started doing it, whew :-).
We talk to Creative Commons about a lot of stuff, and (I hope) may be able to work with them on the Creator-Endorsed Mark. This sort of ground-up reframing isn't what they're about, generally, but there is some overlap. They're very much about broadening the choice of licenses artists have and getting artists to see the benefits of loosening restrictions (yay); they're not so much about reframing the entire rhetoric of "choice" as opposed to "restriction", etc.