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.
Final Version of "Copying Is Not Theft" Released!
The first official release of Copying Is Not Theft is now ready, with a new sound track arranged by Nik Phelps and sung by Connie Champagne:
Download the high-res version at archive.org.
Question Copyright's first Minute Meme is a response to messages that have tried to convince people that copying information is the same as stealing property, when it's an entirely different (and generally positive) thing. Until the air is cleared on that point, it's hard to have any kind of useful conversation about copying, sharing, copyright, or licensing.
The purpose of these Minute Memes is to give educators and commentators more tools to help clear the air. Copying is not Theft conveys its simple idea with a catchy tune, clever lyrics, and delightful animation by Nina Paley. Many thanks to Nik Phelps and Connie Champagne for a terrific sound track. We also thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts for supporting this meme and others with a generous grant. Copying Is Not Theft is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
See the Minute Memes home page for more about the project. See the Copying Is Not Theft home page for more about this meme and for other arrangements, remixes, and mashups, based on the draft Nina released last December.
Brian Lehrer Live television interview with Nina Paley and Karl Fogel
New York City public radio host Brian Lehrer interviewed Nina Paley and Karl Fogel on his CUNY TV show Brian Lehrer Live on February 17th. The conversation ranged from Nina's distribution model for her film Sita Sings the Blues to the broader copyright reform movement, and they showed two of the Minute Memes as well. The video is now available:
It's the middle segment of a three-segment show. The entire show is worth watching, too. The first segment is a debate about the ACTA ("Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement") treaty and how it tightens international copyright restrictions. If you follow copyright reform at all, you'll be frustrated at how resolutely the participants neglect to question the assumptions (for one thing, copying is not counterfeiting). We tried to come back to some of those points during the middle segment. The third segment is a fascinating interview with Jen Bekman and Jonathan Melber of 20x200, with artist Clare Grill joining by video chat. In all segments, the host, Brian Lehrer, asks good questions; he's obviously been thinking about the issues.
Wasn't it Romantic?
This beautiful sequence from the 1932 film Love Me Tonight illustrates the evolution and flourishing of a cultural work through copying. Ironically, the song Isn't It Romantic is now owned by Sony/ATV, so this sort of transmission can only take place in movies, fantasies, and the distant past.
An Alternative Primer on National and International Copyright Law
QuestionCopyright.org recently received a wonderful surprise in the mail: An Alternative Primer on National and International Copyright Law in the Global South, by Prof. Alan C. Story and his colleagues at The CopySouth Research Group. It's a 66 page critical survey of not only international copyright laws and treaties, but of the processes by which those laws and treaties come to be enacted.
I wrote back to Prof. Story:
It's a great relief to see some unembarrassed copyright skepticism in academic legal studies. In every other field, questioning of assumptions is considered good practice; [copyright] law seems to have somehow been exempt from this for a long time, and I'm not quite sure why. Too many scholars repeat the same theories of why we have copyright, without looking rigorously at its actual history nor at its effects, quantifiable and otherwise. Your primer is a breath of fresh air.
He responded with the following offer to all readers:
The Creator-Endorsed Mark in Action: Mars Yau's Sita iPhone apps
Sita Sings the Blues is now available FREE for the iPhone, rather than for $3.99. The former price was required because for every copy of Sita “sold,” I had to pay almost $2 to extortionate corporate licensors. That’s a flat fee; doesn’t matter what the sale price is. So selling Sita apps for the customary $.99 would result in a huge loss for me, since I’d be paying far more than that to the licensors.
The solution of course was to make it FREE (gratis). They’re all Promotional Copies. No sale, no license fee. To support Mars Yau, who created the app, and me, who created the movie, you can buy the Sita Wallpaper App for $.99. And of course you can always donate to the Sita Distribution Project.
I'm especially gratified by app develope Mars Yau's correct use if the Creator Endorsed Mark. It's displayed prominently on the free app, indicating my authentic endorsement of this particulr distribution. On the $.99 Wallpaper app, he applied the "50% supports the artist" version:
Welcome to our new legal interns, Kat Walsh and Victor Cohen.
Question Copyright welcomes two new members: legal interns Kat Walsh and Victor Cohen, who will be working with our counsel Karen Sandler.
Victor is a third-year student at Brooklyn Law School, and has worked with the Brooklyn Law Incubator and Policy (BLIP) Clinic helping to defend artists against copyright infringement suits. Kat is in her last semester at the George Mason University law school, focusing on copyrights, patents, and trademarks, and is currently the Executive Secretary of the Wikimedia Foundation, where she has been a board member since 2006.
You'll see their names appear more and more here in the coming months, as they take a hand in current and upcoming projects. Welcome, Kat and Victor!
What We Lose When We Embrace Copyright
A lot of our work at Question Copyright happens in small chunks, because the issues and myths surrounding copyright are so numerous and interconnected that it's usually best to disentangle them and try to deal with them one by one. (That's what the Minute Memes project is all about, for example.) Slowly, brick by brick, we're trying to strengthen the idea that sharing culture is a human right.
But sometimes it's nice to just come right out make the case all at once too, through straightforward, rigorous reasoning. The article below from Danny Colligan is a resource we've long needed: an "article of reference" that lays out the arguments against copyright restrictions in a thorough, well-organized and well-referenced way. Each section in this article is meant to be linked to (just hover over a section title to see its link name), the article as a whole is a great read from beginning to end, and the references section is a treasure trove. For any open-minded skeptics of copyright reform out there, this is the perfect place to start — if you've been wondering how people could possibly object to copyright, the answer is below.
What We Lose When We Embrace Copyright
by Danny Colligan
Table of contents
- Scope of this article
- Introduction
- What is copyright?
- What is copyright not?
- A brief aside on computers and computer networks
- Why copyright is detrimental to society
- Copyright enforcement necessarily entails monitoring of all computer communications, and therefore the destruction of online privacy
- Copyright law criminalizes a large percentage of the population
- Copyright law chills academic research
- Copyright law's reach already extends to many things, and is expanding with no end in sight
- Copyright law creates a corporate information police, undermining accountability and due process
- Copyright law erodes the public domain and free culture
- Copyright law poses large economic costs to society
- Copyright law prevents the Internet from fulfilling its promise
- Conclusion
- Responses
- "But how will X make money?"
- "Couldn't we tweak copyright law?"
- "Aren't your complaints actually about DRM?"
- "What about the advantages of copyright?"
- "Is anyone actually advocating Deep Packet Inspection on the Internet, or is that just a straw man you set up?"
- "Doesn't copyleft depend on copyright?"
- References and Further Reading
- Acknowledgments
- License
- Version
Scope of this article
This article is intended for a general audience. No technical nor legal background is assumed. Also, I only examine American copyright law here.
Introduction
With the advent of computers and computer network technology, copyright law has become increasingly relevant in the average American's life. One of the themes in the relationship between technology and law has been that law frequently lags behind technology. Copyright law, however, goes even further — it plainly contradicts the realities of modern technology. Specifically, computers and computer networks copy information, often without the explicit consent of any person, and copyright law criminalizes such copying. This mismatch of legality and reality poses devastating consequences.
All Creative Work Is Derivative (Minute Meme #2)
Note: All Creative Work Is Derivative, by Nina Paley, is the second meme of our Minute Memes series. It was supported by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation.
Message: All Creative Work is Derivative.
Why: Copyright control extends not just to verbatim copies, but to "derivative works." This has led to censorship on a grand scale. For example, the seminal German silent film "Nosferatu" was deemed a derivative work of "Dracula" and courts ordered all copies destroyed. Shortly before his death, author J.D. Salinger convinced U.S. courts to censor another author who transformed his characters. And so on.
The whole history of human culture evolves through copying, making tiny transformations (sometimes called "errors") with each replication. Copying is the engine of cultural progress. It is not "stealing." It is, in fact, quite beautiful, and leads to a cultural diversity that inspires awe.
Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Download high resolution and OGG formats at archive.org.
The Revolution Will Be Animated
Filmmaker Marine Lormant Sebag has released The Revolution Will Be Animated, a twenty-minute documentary presenting multiple viewpoints on copyright in the digital age, focusing on Nina Paley, author of Sita Sings the Blues and now Artist-in-Residence at QuestionCopyright.org. It's very well-made, and includes some of the best selections of Nina Paley speaking to be found anywhere. Paley talks about how she ran into copyright restrictions herself, her decision to release her own film under a free license, and her experiences since taking the plunge into the audience-distribution model. The contrasting segments with well-known animator Bill Plympton (who continues to distribute his work under traditional copyright restrictions) are also worth a close look: his belief in the monopoly system is clear, and he says Paley simply made "a big mistake" in using music without first arranging permission.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but: what have we come to when an artist like Bill Plympton can say with a straight face that people should get permission to use music? One could hardly make a better case for radical copyright reform than his own words.
The Revolution Will Be Animated is itself released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License. Spread the word.
Andy Warhol Foundation Supports our Minute Memes Project with $30k Grant.
We are pleased to announce that the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts has given their 2009 Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Award to our Minute Memes animation project. The award comes with a grant of $30,000 USD, to fund the creation of the first three memes (one of which is already available in draft form).
We thank the Andy Warhol Foundation for their support, and for their recognition of copyright's effects on freedom of expression. Our application to the Foundation focused on this point:
The Minute Memes project is a series of one-minute animated videos about copyright restrictions and artistic freedom, to be made by award-winning graphic artist and animator Nina Paley — author of the film "Sita Sings the Blues", adjunct faculty at Parsons The New School For Design in New York City (teaching Visual Narrative), 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, and Artist in Residence at QuestionCopyright.org.
The Minute Memes are a response to widely-available videos and other materials from the copyright industry (see reference [1]), in which the message is that copyright is a natural and absolute property right that trumps freedom of expression and people's ability to share and reimagine the culture around them. The Minute Memes will counteract this through visual storytelling, backed by still-image and written supplementary materials, to show how artists and audiences can thrive in a more permissive, less monopolistic environment than the one envisioned by the current copyright system.
The Minute Memes will offer an aesthetically engaging and intellectually consistent framework for considering copyright's restrictive effects. 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 over copies must be bound up with attribution; etc. We have already seen anecdotal evidence that there is a need for the Minute Memes; for example, see [2].
This grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation is also a kind of seed funding for the entire project, which will be a series of twelve or more memes (see the project page for details). We are actively seeking funding for the other memes, as well as for other projects that question and reframe copyright restrictions. If you are interested in supporting our work, or know someone who might be, please contact us or donate.
