[2] [2]

We're at the Open Video Conference [2] in New York City right now, and it's terrific: a gathering of creative people who are dedicated to building freedom into both the technical and the legal infrastructure of the Internet. Today I heard a great talk by Prof. Gabriella Coleman of New York University: The Politics and Poetics of DeCSS [3], on the connection between computer code and legal theories of free speech, and how the kind of Internet we get depends in part on how that connection fares in courts.

If you're at the conference, come stop by the QuestionCopyright.org table the exhibit hall. We've got s [4]h [5]i [4]r [5]t [4]s [5], stickers [6], DVDs [7], and more [8]. The stickers are free, and they fit on a laptop — there's even one for netbooks.

Saturday we're on a panel (I say "we" because either Nina Paley or I will be a panelist, depending on logistics) at 5pm entitled "Who Owns Popular Culture? Remix and Fair-Use in the Age of Corporate Mass Media":

Our shared popular culture is driven by Hollywood movies, television shows, video games and the latest musical hits. Due to its ubiquitous nature, it is entrenched in our everyday lives, becoming part of the language we speak to each other and also shaping how we see the world around us. Since pop culture is largely created, distributed and owned by a few major media corporations, copyright laws restrict its public use. Given the tight control of these powerful institutions, how can remixers, artists, educators, youtubers and filmmakers find ways to speak using our shared pop cultural language? How does fair-use intersect with copyright regarding our artistic rights to create, criticize and build on the past? This panel will attempt to demystify fair use and re-imagine what a truly public popular media culture might look like.

I'm looking forward to it a lot; the other panelists have all been doing very interesting work:

• Elisa Kreisinger [9]
• Francesca Coppa [10]
• Jonathan McIntosh [11]
• Neil Sieling [12]

See the conference schedule [13] for what else is happening Saturday.

Then on Sunday (the Hack Day [14]), there's a showing of Nina Paley's film Sita Sings the Blues [15] at 2pm in the Tishman auditorium at the conference venue [16], Vanderbilt Hall at New York University. Anyone can download [17] the film, since it's released under a totally free license, but it's much better to see it on the big screen with a lot of other people. Come if you can; you'll be glad you did.

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[18]

Sweden's Pirate Party has just won at least one seat in the European Parliament [19], and possibly two if Sweden's delegation to the assembly expands (through ratification of the Lisbon treaty).

This is great news for European civil rights. The Pirate Party's platform spells out the link between copyright restrictions, censorship, and surveillance. If the government is watching your downloads to make sure you don't "pirate" anything, the crucial fact is: the government is watching your downloads. And when copyright law prevents information and culture from flowing freely, well, that's censorship. You can't enforce copyright restrictions without infringing on civil liberties. The Pirate Party gets this, and apparently a lot of voters in Sweden do too — thanks to the Pirate Party's relentless campaigning on these ideas over the last few years.

Congratulations to the Party and to Rick Falkvinge, who has been working hard [20] for this for a long, long time. The decisive popular lift came from the conviction [21] in Sweden of four operators of the Pirate Bay filesharing site, but it was the Party's careful preparation for this moment that allowed them to take advantage of it.

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All creators get to decide what happens to our work. We can keep it secret, and not show it to anyone. We can keep it private, and limit access to private parties. Or we can make it public, by publishing it.

Once you've made a work public, it is public. So if you don't want people sharing your work, please, please, keep it secret or private.

I've often wondered why "creators" (or corporations) get so upset when the public accesses their work, after they've made it public. If you can't stand people looking at it without your permission, why not keep it locked up in a vault somewhere? No one's forcing you to publish; why insist on doing so, and then claim to be victimized by your own audience?

The answer is that a work has little or no value unless it's shared. The more people take it in, the more valuable it becomes. A work has no cultural value except what the audience gives it. In other words, A WORK'S VALUE COMES FROM THE AUDIENCE.

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By Nina Paley and Karl Fogel

When the copyright industry lobbies for extensions to already-long copyright terms, they always present it as a way of giving the artists of the past their due — as a further protection of the "moral rights" that artists have in their creations.

But consider this: many artists of the past were forced to sign over their copyrights in order to work at all. They may have taken comfort in the fact that copyright would expire after a set time, and in knowing that people would eventually be able to share their work freely. Today, when copyright terms are continually extended, we should stop and wonder if these extensions go against the wishes of the works' dead creators. Few artists of the 1920's or 30's had the option of saying, "I want people to share my work", but they at least knew that copyrights would expire after 28 years — if the terms had been left alone, that is — and this may have made a temporary lockup more acceptable to them.

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Content is an unlimited resource. People can now make perfect copies of digital content for free. That's why they expect content to be free — because it is in fact free. That is GOOD.

Think of "content" — culture — as water. Where water flows, life flourishes.

Containers — objects like books, DVDs, hard drives, apparel, action figures, and prints — are not free. They are a limited resource. No one expects these objects to be free, and people voluntarily pay good money for them.

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A few days ago, we asked musicians [26] to do their own arrangements of Nina Paley's song "Copying Isn't Theft". The response has been great! We'll try to keep this list of remixes and rearrangements up-to-date as they come in.

First, Nina's original:

[27]

Others' versions below...

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One of our upcoming projects is the Minute Memes [28] video series (we're hunting down funding for that and other things right now — leads welcome [29]). Nina Paley, award-winning animator of Sita Sings the Blues [30], wanted her next work after Sita to be about copyright restrictions and censorship, and hit on the idea of "Minute Memes": short, viral videos that use visual storytelling to spread truly revolutionary ideas. You know, radical stuff, like the notion that people should be able to share music without asking permission, or that making a derivative work is an act of homage not destruction. The sorts of ideas you're not likely to hear from the MPAA [31] or the RIAA [32], who, of course, are busy making their own videos [33] to convince you that culture should be owned.

The first Minute Meme will be a video called "Copying Isn't Theft" [34]. It's not ready yet, but Nina's written a song to go with it. Or at least the lyrics and the tune — the rest of the arrangement comes from you. Musicians out there, what can you do with this?

Go wild. Rearrange it, re-dub the vocals, do whatever you need to do. When you think you've got something good, post it somewhere and leave a comment here (or contact us [29]). If it's close enough to what Nina was aiming for, we may be able to use it in the Minute Memes.

Read more … [26]

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(For an example of the Creator-Endorsed Mark being used in commerce, see here [37].)

The Creator-Endorsed Mark is a logo that a distributor can use to indicate that a work is distributed in a way that its creator endorses — typically, by the distributor sharing some of the profits with the creator.

As more and more creators freely circulate their works on the Internet, the mark provides a reliable way for non-exclusive publishers to signal to their customers that they are supporting the artist. We intend the mark to enable consumers to distinguish distributors based on how supportive of the artist they are, and to allow creators to encourage — not necessarily require, but encourage — particular methods of distribution for their freely-licensed work. Our belief is that given a choice, audiences will prefer sources that support the artist, when they have a reliable way of recognizing such sources.

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[15]

Film-maker Nina Paley is close to having her award-winning feature film Sita Sings The Blues out of copyright jail [39] and onto the Internet for free, decentralized distribution.

Our goal is to have the entire film available online by Saturday, March 7th.

We'll need some "seed" sites to host it: Internet servers with the capacity to offer around 10 GB of data for public download (so we can make the film available at various resolutions). If you or your institution has the bandwidth and storage for that, please contact us [29]. We'll work out a way to get the data to you.

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Nina Paley [41] came up with a great phrase about the music and movie industries the other day: "It's like Night of the Living Dead Business Model", she said.

Now comes her reaction to today's New York Times article Digital Pirates Winning Battle With Major Hollywood Studios [42]:

[41]

Knowing Nina, I'm sure she's fine with it being reproduced here — and anywhere else on the Internet. Go for it, folks :-). (Use her large version [43] of the poster if you want.)

I've written a letter to the Times in response to the article, pointing out how there's no need to adopt the industry's terminology (e.g., "stealing") when discussing the issue, and mentioning how copyright primarily subsidizes (non-Internet) distribution rather than creation.

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