Author: ninapaley

(Editor’s note: We’re cross-posting this beautiful essay from ninapaley.com; see also Nina Paley’s similarly-titled interview with Baixa Cultura from April.)

Below are the images and text of a Pecha Kucha talk I gave in Champaign, IL. The Pecha Kucha format is 20 slides x 20 seconds per slide. Hopefully the video will be online within a few months.

You are an information portal. Information enters through your senses, like your ears and eyes, and exits through your expressions, like your voice, your drawing, your writing, and your movements.

In order for culture to stay alive, we have to be open, or permeable. According to Wikipedia, Permeance is “the degree to which a material admits a flow of matter or energy.” We are the material through which information flows.

It’s through this flow that culture stays alive and we stay connected to each other. Ideas flow in, and they flow out, of each of us. Ideas change a little as they go along; this is known as evolution, progress, or innovation.

But thanks to Copyright, we live in a world where some information goes in, but cannot legally come out.
Often I hear people engaged in creative pursuits ask, “Am I allowed to use this? I don’t want to get in trouble.”

In our Copyright regime, “trouble” may include lawsuits, huge fines, and even jail. ”Trouble” means violence. ”Trouble” has shut down many a creative enterprise. So the threat of “trouble” dictates our choices about what we express.

Copyright activates our internal censors. Internal censorship is the enemy of creativity; it halts expression before it can begin. The question, “am I allowed to use this?” indicates the asker has surrendered internal authority to lawyers, legislators, and corporations.

This phenomenon is called Permission Culture. Whenever we censor our expression, we close a little more and information flows a little less. The less information flows, the more it stagnates. This is known as chilling effects.

I have asked myself: did I ever consent to letting “Permission Culture” into my brain? Why am I complying with censorship? How much choice do I really have about what information goes in and comes out of me?

The answer is: I have some choice regarding what I expose myself to, and what I express, but not total control. I can choose whether to watch mainstream media, for example. And I can choose what information to pass along.

But to be in the world, and to be open, means all kinds of things can and do get in that are beyond my control. I don’t get to choose what goes in based on its copyright status. In fact proprietary images and sounds are the most aggressively rammed into our heads. For example:

“Have a holly jolly Christmas, It’s the best time of the year
“I don’t know if there’ll be snow, but have a cup of cheer
“Have a holly jolly Christmas, And when you walk down the street
“Say hello to friends you know and everyone you meet!”

I hate Christmas music. But because I live in the U.S., and need to leave the house even in the months of November and December, I can’t NOT hear it. It goes right through my earholes and into my brain, where it plays over and over ad nauseum.

Here are some of the corporations I could “get in trouble with” for sharing that song and clip in public. I wasn’t consulted by them before having their so-called “intellectual property” blasted into my head as a child, so I didn’t ask their permission to put it in my slide show.

Copyright is automatic and there’s no way to opt out. But you can add a license granting some of the permissions copyright automatically takes away. Creative Commons, the most widespread brand of license, allows its users to lift various restrictions of copyright one at a time.

The problem with licenses is that they’re based on copyright law. The same threat of violence behind copyright is behind alternative licenses too. Licenses actually reinforce the mechanism of copyright. Everyone still needs to seek permission – it’s just that they get it a little more often.

Like copyright itself, licenses are often too complex for most people to understand. So licenses have the unfortunate effect of encouraging people to pay even MORE attention to copyright, which gives even more authority to that inner censor. And who let that censor into our heads in the first place?

Although I use Free licenses and would appreciate meaningful copyright reform, licenses and laws aren’t the solution. The solution is more and more people just ignoring copyright altogether. I want to be one of those people.

A few years ago I declared sovereignty over my own head. Freedom of Speech begins at home. Censorship and “trouble” still exist outside my head, and that’s where they’ll stay – OUTSIDE my head. I’m not going to assist bad laws and media corporations by setting up an outpost for them in my own mind.

I no longer favor or reject works based on their copyright status. Ideas aren’t good or bad because of what licenses people slap on them. I just relate to the ideas themselves now, not the laws surrounding them. And I try to express myself the same way.

Like millions of others who don’t give a rat’s ass about copyright, I hope you join me. Make Art, Not Law.

crossposted from ninapaley.com

I am hereby changing Sita Sings the Blues‘ CC-BY-SA (Share Alike) license to CC-0.

A few years ago I started thinking about taking a vow of non-violence: a commitment to never sue anyone over Knowledge (or Culture, Cultural Works, Art, Intellectual Pooperty, whatever you call it). Copyright law is hopelessly broken; indeed, the Law in the US is broken all over the place. Why would I resort to the same broken law to try to fix abuses that occur within it?

We live in a messed-up world. My choices, however principled, will not change that. People will continue to censor, suppress, and enclose Knowledge. Share-Alike – the legal requirement to keep Knowledge Free – has ironically resulted in the suppression of same.

“Not using knowledge is an offense to it,” wrote Jeff Jarvis, reflecting on the death of Aaron Swartz.

I learned of Aaron’s death on Sunday; on Monday, the National Film Board of Canada told me I had to fill out paperwork to “allow” filmmaker (and personal friend) Chris Landreth to refer to Sita Sings the Blues in his upcoming short, Subconscious Password, even though Fair Use already freed the NFB from any legitimate fear of Share-Alike’s viral properties. I make compromises to my principles every day, but that Monday I just couldn’t. The idiocy of NFB’s lawyers was part of the same idiocy that Aaron fought in liberating documents from JSTOR. I couldn’t bear to enable more bad lawyers, more bad decisions, more copyright bullshit, by doing unpaid paperwork for a corrupt and stupid system. I just couldn’t.

So the NFB told Chris to remove all references to SSTB from his film.

There are consequences for taking a principled stance. People criticize you, fear you, and pity you. You get plenty of public condemnation. You lose money. Sometimes the law goes after you, and although that hasn’t happened to me yet, it could as I do more civil disobedience in the future.

But the real victim of my principled stance isn’t me, it’s my work. When I took a principled stance against Netflix’s DRM, the result was fewer people saw SSTB. When countless television stations asked for the “rights” to SSTB and I told them they already had them, the result was they didn’t broadcast it. When publishers wanted to make a SSTB-based book, the Share-Alike license was a dealbreaker, so there are no SSTB books.

My punishment for opposing enclosure, restrictions, censorship, all the abuses of copyright, is that my work gets it.

Not using knowledge is an offense to it.

So, to the NFB, to Netflix, to all you publishers and broadcasters, to you legions of fucking lawyers: Sita Sings  the Blues is now in the Public Domain. You have no excuse for suppressing it now.

Am I still fighting? Yes. BUT NOT WITH THE LAW. I still believe in all the reasons for BY-SA, but the reality is I would never, ever sue anyone over SSTB or any cultural work. I will still publicly condemn abuses like enclosure and willful misattribution, but why point a loaded gun at everyone when I’d never fire it? CC-0 is an acknowledgement I’ll never go legal on anyone, no matter how abusive and evil they are.

CC-0 is as close as I can come to a public vow of legal nonviolence. The law is an ass I just don’t want to ride.

I cannot abolish evil. The Law cannot abolish evil; indeed, it perpetuates and expands it. People will continue to censor, silence, threaten, and abuse Knowledge, and our broken disaster of a copyright regime will continue encouraging that. But in fighting monsters, I do not wish myself to become a monster, nor feed the monster I’m fighting.

Neither CC-BY-SA nor CC-0 will fix our flawed world with its terribly broken copyright regime. What I can say is SSTB has been under CC-BY-SA for the last 4 years, so I know what that’s like and can share results of that experiment. Going forward under CC-0 I will learn new things and have more results to share. That seems like a win even if some bad scenarios come into play. I honestly have not been able to determine which Free license is “better,” and switching to CC-0 may help answer that question.

Recently, I gave a Sita Sings the Blues talk to a roomful of 15-to-17-year-olds. Near the end I explained Free Culture and my stance against copyright, which led to some interesting discussion. Turns out most of them are manga fans, and familiar with publishers’ complaints about scanned and translated manga shared freely online. They all read them anyway (except one, who prefers to read entire manga in the bookstore). I asked them how they would choose to support artists they liked (once they had some disposable income) and they said:

1. Donate buttons – with the qualification that they want to know as much as possible about where the donation is going. They said honesty and transparency are important.
2. Kickstarter – They all knew about it (which was notable because none of them had heard of Flattr) and valued pitch videos that explained how the money would be used.
3. Custom drawings
4. Merch
5. Physical copies
6. Live Shared Experiences, including ballet, museum exhibits, and concerts. The event aspect was important; they wanted to be able to say, “Remember that one time when that awesome show was here…” They agreed seeing things in person is a more powerful experience than seeing things online, and worth spending more on. One said she would buy CD at a live show because “it reminds you of the show.”
7. One said he would support artists by promoting their work to his friends.

Semi-related, I took an informal poll of how many would prefer to read a book on paper vs. an e-reader. The vast majority said paper, but what they really seemed to want was dual formats: paper copies to read comfortably and collect, and digital copies to search and reference. Makes sense to me. Only two of them had iPads, and none used them for “enhanced eBooks.”

My favorite quote of the afternoon, from a 15-year-old girl:

“We don’t want everything for free. We just want everything.

crossposted from ninapaley.com

Crossposted from Techdirt.com

This morning a friend shared with me some amusing American Sign Language videos, and in return I wanted to share with him my favorite ASL video of all time: B. Storm’s interpretation of the Gnarls Barkley song Crazy. Only I couldn’t because it was gone. Why? Because “This video contains content from WMG (Warner Music Group), who has blocked it on copyright grounds.” This is appalling for many reasons, not least of which being the video is almost certainly fair use.

Copying is not theft, but censorship is. When a video is blocked, banned, erased, or otherwise censored, we don’t have it any more. The commons is robbed. When B. Storm copied the song Crazy into his video, WMG’s copies were still there. When WMG censored B. Storm’s video, it was gone.

I couldn’t accept that such a great video was simply gone, so I attempted to recreate and re-share the original video. I found a silent version and combined it with the song, which I captured from the official video using Audio Hijack Pro (having written that, I expect storm troopers to bust down my door any minute now). Unfortunately its sync was a little off; soundtracks end up slightly different lengths and speeds due to all the different kinds of compression out there, and the song I captured was slightly longer than what B. Storm had on his original video. Fortunately another web search, using different terms, led me to this website of videos curated for deaf kids, which miraculously contained the unmolested video embedded from weebly. This I was able to download, and then re-upload to Vimeo where it’s easier to share and embed. Of course it could be taken down at any time, so get it while you can:

Great art like this matters too much to passively let monopolists erase it from our common culture. When you find good videos online, consider making local back-up copies. We never know what’s going to be censored when, and without audience back-ups some great art could be lost forever.

vimeo.com/30856482:

Here is the video from my first How To Free Your Work workshop, given at NY Foundation for the Arts in Brooklyn, October 5 2011. You can get all the information contained herein as easy-to-read instructions right here. If you want me to give a workshop like this to your group, please contact our Speakers Bureau.

Full description (from Vimeo):

How to Free Your Work
Presented by Nina Paley

 

October 5, 2011
New York Foundation for the Arts

 

Free culture is a growing understanding among artists and audiences that people shouldn’t have to ask permission to copy, share, and use each others’ work. Producing and sharing their content openly can drastically increase audiences and lower publicity costs, allowing artists to make more money. But how, exactly, is free culture practiced? In this workshop, filmmaker, animator, cartoonist and artist Nina Paley explains the theory and practice of free culture, beginning with the real-world example of her feature film Sita Sings the Blues, covering topics, such as: how to choose an open license, demystifying the many Creative Commons and other licenses available; how to make it easier for fans to support you; how to do less work on your own and enable your fans to do more; and how to use unlimited content to sell your stuff.

 

Nina Paley is the creator of the animated musical feature film Sita Sings the Blues, which has screened in over 150 film festivals and won over 35 international awards including the Annecy Grand Crystal, the IFFLA Grand Jury Prize, and a Gotham Award. Nina made it over a period of 5 years on her home computer using Macromedia Flash and Final Cut Pro. Her adventures in our broken copyright system led her to copyLeft her film, and join QuestionCopyright.org as Artist-in-Residence. Prior to becoming an animator Nina was a syndicated cartoonist; she is now re-freely releasing all her old comics with a Copyheart message. A 2006 Guggenheim Fellow, Nina is currently producing a series of animated shorts about intellectual freedom called Minute Memes, partially funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation, and a new daily comic strip, Mimi & Eunice.

The Public Domain may not be growing (thanks to endless retroactive copyright term extensions) but it still contains a “whopping plentitude.” The biggest challenge to users is simply discovering PD works in the first place. Fortunately the Open Knowledge Foundation (one of the best Free Culture organizations anywhere) has just given everyone a leg up with its new web site, the Public Domain Review. From their About page:

The Public Domain Review aspires to become a bounteous gateway into the whopping plenitude that is the public domain, helping our readers to explore this rich terrain by surfacing unusual and obscure works, and offering fresh reflections and unfamiliar angles on material which is more well known.

Go there to find all kinds of delicious images, texts, sounds, and other treasures that, thanks to our collective cultural amnesia, are as fresh and exciting as anything Big Media tries forcing down our throats today.

Above: Princess Nicotine, and early stop-motion silent film, featured on The Public Domain Review.

Adapted from a talk and slide show I presented at the Open Knowledge Conference in Berlin on July 1, 2011. –NP
Crossposted from ninapaley.com

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it means that the program’s users have the four essential freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

— The Free Software Definition

These are the Four Freedoms of Free Software. They are foundational principles, and they are exactly right. They have served and continue to serve the Free Software Movement very well. They place the user’s freedom ahead of all other concerns. Free Software is a principled movement, but Free Culture is not – at least not so far. Why?

1. The No Derivatives (-ND) Restriction

If you tinker with software, you can improve it. You can also break it or make it worse, but the Freedom to Tinker is one of the foundational 4 Freedoms of Free Software. Your software may also be used for purposes you don’t like, used by “bad people,” or even used against you; the Four Freedoms wisely counsel us to GET OVER IT.
Unfortunately, The Free Software Foundation does not extend “Freedom to Tinker” to Culture:

Cultural works released by the Free Software Foundation come with “No Derivatives” restrictions. They rationalize it here:

Works that express someone’s opinion—memoirs, editorials, and so on—serve a fundamentally different purpose than works for practical use like software and documentation. Because of this, we expect them to provide recipients with a different set of permissions (notice how users are now called “recipients,” and their Freedoms are now called “permissions” –NP): just the permission to copy and distribute the work verbatim. (link)

The problem with this is that it is dead wrong. You do not know what purposes your works might serve others. You do not know how works might be found “practical” by others. To claim to understand the limits of “utility” of cultural works betrays an irrational bias toward software and against all other creative work. It is anti-Art, valuing software above the rest of culture. It says coders alone are entitled to Freedom, but everyone else can suck it. Use of -ND restrictions is an unjustifiable infringement on the freedom of others.

For example, here I have violated the Free Software Foundation’s No-Derivatives license:

The Four Freedoms of Free Culture:

1. The freedom to run, view, hear, read, play, perform, or otherwise attend to the Work;
2. The freedom to study, analyze, and dissect copies of the Work, and adapt it to your needs;
3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
4. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes.
(link)

Without permission, I’ve created a derivative work: the Four Freedoms of Free Culture. Although I violated FSF’s No-Derivatives license, they violated Freedoms # 2 and 4, so we’re even.

1. The Non-Commercial (-NC) Restriction

The Freedom to Distribute Free Software is essential to its success. It has given rise to many for-profit businesses that benefit the larger community.

Red Hat, Canonical – would the world be better if such companies were forbidden? Would Free Software benefit from a ban on those businesses?

Yet the Cultural ecosystem is stunted by the prevalence of Non-Commercial restrictions. These maintain commercial monopolies around works, and – especially for vocational artists like me – are functionally as restrictive as unmodified copyright. Yet they are widely mislabeled “Free Culture,” or even “Copyleft.”

This is a still from the mostly excellent and popular documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto. This film is many peoples’ introduction to the term “Free Culture” and “Copyleft.” But as you can see, the Non-Commercial restriction is lumped in with actual Free license terms.

See that dollar sign with the slash in it? That means Non-Commercial restrictions, which are most definitely NOT Copyleft. (I’ve posted about Creative Commons’ branding confusion before, but it’s only gotten worse since then.)

This film is itself licensed under unFree Non-Commercial restrictions. As an artist and filmmaker, I have found confusion is rampant among my creative colleagues. Some filmmakers are beginning to think the term “Free Culture” is cool, but they still want to restrict others’ freedom and impose commercial monopolies on their works.

The book Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig its itself not Free culure, but it is widely looked up to. It sets an unfortunate and confusing example with its Non-Commercial license. It illustrates the absence of guiding principles in the Free Culture movement.
I have spoken to many artists who insist there’s “no real difference” between Non-Commercial licenses and Free alternatives. Yet these differences are well known and unacceptable in Free Software, for good reason.

Calling  Non-Commercial restrictions “Free Culture” neuters what could be an effective movement, if it only had principles.

So what do I want?

I want a PRINCIPLED Free Culture Movement.

I want Free Software people to take Culture seriously. I want a Free Culture movement guided by principles of Freedom, just as the Free Software movement is guided by principles of Freedom. I want a name I can use that means something – the phrase “Free Culture” is increasingly meaningless, as it is often applied to unFree practices, and is also the name of a famous book that is itself encumbered with Non-Commercial restrictions.

I want a Free Culture ecosystem that allows artists to make money. I want anyone to be able to accept money for their work of remixing and building on Culture – just as a trucker can accept money for driving on a road. I want money to be among the many incentives to participate in building culture. Without the freedoms to Tinker and Redistribute without restriction, there is little incentive to build on  and improve cultural works. There is little reward to help your neighbor, when you are guaranteed to lose money doing so. “Free Culture” with non-Commercial restrictions will remain a hobby for those with a surplus of time and labor, and those who only accept money from monopolists.

I want commerce without monopolies. I want people to understand the difference.

I want a Free Culture ecosystem that includes equivalents of  businesses like Red Hat and Canonical. I want cultural businesses that give back to their communities, that work with their customers instead of against them. Only if we refuse to place Non-Commercial and No-Derivatives restrictions on our works will a robust Free Culture ecosystem be able to emerge.

I want the Free Software community – those who currently best understand the Four Freedoms – to champion the rest of Culture, not just Software. I want Freedom for All.

“Credit Is Due (The Attribution Song)” is one of the many memes in our Minute Memes series and was supported by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Animation, lyrics, and tune by Nina Paley. Music performed by Evanescent (Vocals & Ukelele: Bliss Blood, Guitar: Al Street). Sound Effects Design by Greg Sextro. Released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.

High-res versions, song, and stills available for download at archive.org. (The direct YouTube page is here.)

LYRICS:
Always give credit where credit is due
if you didn’t write it, don’t say it’s by you
just copy the credit along with the work
or else you’ll come off as an arrogant jerk

Always give credit where credit belongs
we know that you didn’t write Beethoven’s songs
pretending you did makes you look like a fool
unless you’re Beethoven – in that case, it’s cool

A transparent system makes cheating unwise
the simplest web search exposes your lies
no one wants their reputation besmirched
which happens to liars when they are web-searched

Proper citation will make you a star
it shows that you know that we know who you are
Plagiarization will only harm you
so always give credit where credit is due!

Synopsis:
Mimi makes a copy of a Beethoven Symphony with a giant copy machine. Trouble starts when Eunice erases Beethoven’s name and writes in her own. This makes Eunice look like an ass. Searching the Internet (itself a giant copy machine) confirms that Eunice is a liar. Eunice realizes her mistake and corrects it, but by then everyone’s moved on – her plagiarism is barely a blip in the spread of correctly-attributed cultural works through copying. 

Whenever I speak about Free Culture at schools, I’m asked “what about plagiarism?” Copying and plagiarism are two quite different things. As Mimi demonstrates with the giant Copy Machine, copying a work means copying its attribution too:

just copy the credit along with the work

When people copy songs and movies, they don’t change the authors’ names. Plagiarism is something else: it’s lying. If Copyright has anything to do with plagiarism, it’s that it makes it easier to plagiarize (because works and their provenance aren’t public and are therefore easier to obscure and lie about) and increases incentive to do so (because copying with attribution is as illegal as copying without, and including attribution makes the infringement more conspicuous). American Copyright law does not protect attribution to begin with; it is concerned only with “ownership,” not authorship.  Many artists sign their attributions away with the “rights” they sell, which is why it can be difficult to know which artists contributed to corporate works.

I chose Beethoven to illustrate how copyright has nothing to do with preventing plagiarism. All Beethoven’s work is in the Public Domain. Legally, you can take Ludwig van Beethoven’s songs, Jane Austen‘s novels, or Eadweard Muybridge‘s photographs and put any name you want on them. Go ahead! You’re at no risk of legal action. Your reputation may suffer, however, and you definitely won’t be fooling anyone. If anyone has doubts, they can use that same copy machine – the Internet – to sort out who authored what. Lying is very difficult in a public, transparent system. A good analog to this is public encryption keys: their security comes from their publicity.

The song says “always give credit where credit is due,” but in many cases credit is NOT due. For example, how many credits should be at the end of this film? I devoted about two and a half seconds to these credits:

Movie and Song by Nina Paley
Vocals by Bliss Blood

But I could have credited far more. In fact, the credits could take longer than the movie. Here are some more credits:

Ukelele: Bliss Blood
Guitar: Al Street
Recorded by Bliss Blood and Al Street

What about sound effects? Were it not for duration constraints, this would be in the movie:

Sound Effects Design by Greg Sextro

Every single sound effect in the cartoon was made by someone. Should I credit each one? Crash-wobble by (Name of Foley Artist Here). Cartoon zip-run by (Name of Other Foley Artist Here). And so on: dozens of sound effects were used in the cartoon, and each one had an author. What about the little noises Mimi & Eunice make? Not only could the recording engineer be credited, but the voice actor as well (as far as I know, these were both Greg Sextro).

I included a few seconds of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony at the end, which I didn’t credit in the movie.  Should I have? Why or why not?

I could credit the characters:

Starring:
Mimi
Eunice
& Special Guest Appearance by
Ludwig van Beethoven

I could be more detailed in crediting myself:

Lyrics and Melody by Nina Paley
Character design: Nina Paley
Animation: Nina Paley
Produced by Nina Paley
Directed by Nina Paley
Edited by Nina Paley
Backgrounds by Nina Paley
Color design by Nina Paley
Layout: Nina Paley
Based on the comic strip “Mimi & Eunice” by Nina Paley

And the funder!

This Minute Meme was funded by a generous grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

I didn’t even make a card for the Minute Memes logo. Should that be in there?

I used a Public Domain painting of Beethoven for the Beethoven character, which is by Joseph Karl Stieler.  Who photographed the painting? Who digitized the photograph? Is credit due here?

The ass drawing also came from Wikimedia Commons, where it’s credited to Pearson Scott Foresman. But who actually drew it? I have no idea. I doubt that Pearson Scott Foresman could even legally claim the copyright on it to “donate” to Wikimedia in the first place, but there they are, getting credit for it instead of an artist. That’s because copyright is only concerned with “ownership,” not authorship.

Then there’s the software I used, good old pre-Adobe Macromedia Flash. Should I credit the software? What about the programmers who contributed to the software?
I also used a Macintosh computer (I know, I know, when Free Software and Open Hardware come close to doing what my old system does, I’ll be the first to embrace it) and a Wacom Cintiq pen monitor. How many people deserve credit for these in my movie?

Mimi and Eunice themselves were “inspired” by many historical cartoons. Early Disney and Fleischer animations, the “rubber hose” style, Peanuts, this recent cartoon, and countless other sources I don’t even know the names of – but would be compelled to find out, if credit were in fact due. Is it?

And so on. It is possible to attribute ad absurdum. So where is credit due? It’s complicated, the rules are changing, and standards are determined organically by communities, not laws. I had to edit the song for brevity, but I kind of wish I hadn’t excised this line:

A citation shows us where we can get more
of all the good culture that Free Culture’s for

Attribution is a way to help your neighbor. You share not only the work, but information about the work that helps them pursue their own research and maybe find more works to enjoy. How much one is expected to help their neighbor is determined by (often unspoken) community standards. People who don’t help their neighbors tend to be disliked. And those who go out of their way to deceive and defraud their neighbors – i.e. plagiarists – are hated and shunned. Plagiarism doesn’t affect works – works don’t have feelings, and what is done to one copy has no effect on other copies. Plagiarism affects communities, and it is consideration for such that determines where attribution is appropriate.

At least that’s the best I can come up with right now. Attribution is actually a very complicated concept; if you have more ideas about it, please share.

(Translations: Español)

I. Theory:

II: Practice: How To Free Your Work

1. Get your own web site.
   How to make a web site.

   There are countless ways to make a web site, from hiring professional designers and technologists, to getting a free blog. Assuming you’re broke and have no tech skills, here’s the easiest way to do the latter:

   1. Sign up for a WordPress blog here. It’s free and easy. 
   2. Follow instructions from there

   That’s it. Your own web site, free, with loads of templates to choose from and lots of help from wordpress. That’s all you need! You can certainly get more advanced from there, but that will require more skills, time, and/or money. A free WordPress blog is more than enough to get started.

2. Get PayPal, Flattr accounts. Place “donate” and “Flattr” buttons on web site.
   How to Receive Money Online.

   To receive money online, you will need a money-receiving account. Here are some you can sign up for – click the link(s) and follow instructions.

   PayPal (recommended) – easiest to use, and allows anyone to accept donations.

   Amazon Payments – a little more comlplicated. This is also the payment system used by Kickstarter.com

   Google Checkout – only allows registered 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6) tax-exempt organizations to receive donations

   Once you have a PayPal account, you can generate a donate button for your web site.

   In addition to PayPal, you can also get a Flattr account. Flattr combines a donations system with social networking to create a hybrid that’s both fun and hard to explain. Visit Flattr.com for more information.

3. Choose a Free License.
   What is a Free License?

   A Free License is legal language that sits on top of copyright. In our current copyright regime, everything is copyrighted whether you want it to be or not. What I’m writing here is copyrighted, even though I don’t want it to be. There is currently no way to “opt out” of copyright. All I can do is attach a “Free License” to the work, that grants users some of the fredoms that copyright automatically takes away.

   A Free License guarantees the Four Freedoms of Free Culture:

   1. The freedom to view, hear, read, or otherwise attend to the Work;
   2. The freedom to study, analyze, and dissect copies of the Work, and adapt it to your needs;
   3. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor;
   4. The freedom to improve the Work, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits

   Creative Commons is the most famous brand of Free licenses, however most Creative Commons licenses are not Free! Just because a license is branded Creative Commons does not mean it’s free. In fact most Creative Commons licenses have restrictions that are incompatible with Free Culture.

   The 3 Free licenses Creative Commons offers are:

   CC-BY-SA,
   CC-BY, and
   CC-0.

   If you see the letters -NC or -ND anywhere in a Creative Commons license, it is not a Free license. Be careful – use only one of the above Creative Commons licenses, otherwise your work will not be Free and you may alienate those fans who could help you the most.

   Other Free licenses for cultural works include the Free Art license and the WTFPL.

   Because all licenses ride on top of copyright, they can be seen as validating or extending the reach of Copyright law. For those who are totally fed up with existing laws and the interference of lawyers in the cultural sphere, a “non-license” may be preferable. Non-licenses are not licenses, they are statements of intention: that the artist wants their work to be copied. They don’t ride on top of any existing laws, and attempt to avoid law (and the state force that backs it up) altogether.

   Our favorite un-license is the Copyheart, which looks like this:

   ♡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share.

   But there are others, like Kopimi, and of course you can write your own!

   Whether you use a lawyer-approved Free License or a non-license, it’s crucial to let your audience know they are Free to copy, share, and build on your work. While it’s tempting to ignore copyright altogether, your audience can’t know your work is Free unless you tell them. Try to include either a notice of Free license (i.e. “CC-BY-SA”) or a Copyheart message (“♡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share“) wherever you post your work.

   More about Free vs. unFree licenses here:
   http://freedomdefined.org/Licenses/NC

   questioncopyright.org/CC-branding-confusion

   http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/08/31/four-freedoms-of-free-culture/

   http://robmyers.org/weblog/2006/11/why-the-nc-permission-culture-simply-doesnt-work/

   http://robmyers.org/weblog/2008/02/noncommercial-sharealike-is-not-copyleft/

4. Upload master file(s) to archive.org.
   How to upload your work to archive.org.

   Archive.org upload FAQs

   When you upload a work to archive.org, you will see a dialog page like this:

   

   Fill out the fields (unlike this example, you should include a link to your web site in the “description” box!), then click “choose a license.” Archive.org lets you attach both Free and un-Free Creative Commons licenses to uploaded works. It is very important you specify a FREE license during the upload process.

   Archive.org does not let you specify licenses by name; instead they give you a dialog box and ask you to check options. To specify a Free License, you must choose either CC-BY-SA, CC-BY, or CC-0.

   To specify CC-BY-SA, check the options as follows:
   Allow commercial uses of your work? YES
   Allow modifications of your work? YES, as long as others share alike

   

   To specify CC-BY, check the options as follows:
   Allow commercial uses of your work? YES
   Allow modifications of your work? YES

   

   To specify CC-0, click on the CC-0 link.

   Once you’ve selected your options, click “Select a License.” You should get a box that looks like this:

   

   Once the upload is complete, click “Share My File(s)”. Archive.org will create a page for your work that will look something like this:

   

   Copy the URL of your archive.org page, and link to it from your web site and everywhere else. For example, the URL of the page above is http://www.archive.org/details/AvatarsOfVishnu

   

5. Place link to archive.org page on web site. Also write about the work, and post versions directly on web site if possible.
   Formatting Your Work For Easy Sharing.

   You want your work to be as easy and convenient to copy as possible. A text is likelier to be read if it’s formatted for existing browsers and eReaders. A song is likelier to be used in films, videos, dances and remix projects if it’s available in high quality .wav; it’s likelier to be shared by fans as an .mp3 or .ogg. Images are most easily shared on web sites as low resolution jpegs and .pngs, but they can have far more applications as vector files (.svg, .eps) and high resolution TIFFs. Ideally, release your work in as many formats as possible. 

   But how do you do that? Reformatting can be a real pain, and how do you even know what file formats your audience wants?

   This is where fans come in. Ask your fans for help – even if you only have one fan, or a small handful. Release a master file and ask them to convert to other formats. If you’re a musician, upload an uncompressed .wav file of a song on archive.org. Then ask fans convert it to .mp3, .ogg, and other formats and repost those on archive.org, as well as everywhere else they can share the files.

   I released “Avatars of Vishnu” illustrations as high resolution .png files. A fan immediately converted them to .svg vector files.

   Once fans know you’re releasing your work under free licenses, they may convert your files to more useable formats as a matter of course. In addition to providing a valuable service, this work strengthens the bond between fan and artist; what Mike Masnick calls “CwF” (“Connect with Fans.”)

6. If work is a video, upload it to Youtube and Vimeo in addition to Archive.org. Include links to archive.org page and your own web site in “description” field (see example). Embed the video on your own site.
7. PROMOTE. Tell all your fans. Ask them to spread the word. If you have Twitter, Facebook, and other social network accounts, post that your work is up and Freely available. Make sure to name the specific license (ie, CC-BY-SA, not “Creative Commons”), so they KNOW it’s Free. Include link to your web site.
   What If I Don’t Want to Promote My Work Online?

   The Internet isn’t for everyone. Not everyone wants to spend time on FaceBook, or Twitter; not everyone “gets” them. Not everyone wants to blog, or email, or whatever the kids are doing these days. One solution is to force yourself to learn how to use these tools, but there is another option: ASK YOUR FANS TO DO IT FOR YOU.

   If you’re a musician who gives live concerts, ask for “social media” volunteers at your next performance. If you’re an artist who dislikes the Internet, but goes to openings and parties and networking events in Real Life, put the word out among your friends, fans, and patrons. If you teach, let your students know you’re looking for help. Others can take care of online promotion for you – if you let them. The best way to let them is to give them a stake in your art, and not try to control them. Once again, Freeing your work is the key to receiving this service. Then fans aren’t doing work for you, they’re doing work with you. As long as you place copy restrictions on your work, fans will feel exploited. By Freeing your work, you and your fans are on the same team.

8. If you have something to sell in connection with the work (DVDs, CDs, T-shirts, Keychains, services, custom commissions, etc.) make these available when you release the work. If you have an online store, link to it. If you’re a performer, bring items to your performances and have a volunteer sell them for you. Let people know they can purchase said merchandise at your shows.
   How Do I Make Money?

   There are countless ways to make money with Free works. Freeing them is the first step. 

   My business model is “Content is Free, containers are not. Use the unlimited resource to sell the limited resource.”

   

   Just because your content is Free, doesn’t mean you can’t sell “containers” of it: paper books, discs, hard drives, prints, paintings, and so on. One successful example of this principle in action is my own “Sita Sings the Blues” e-store. Authors whose ebooks are available for free sell more paper copies (see Paulo Coelho). The more content (which is non-ravalrous) circulates freely, the greater demand for rivalrous goods related to it. Which you or your agents can sell.

   Related, but not exactly the same as ours,is Techdirt.com‘s basic business model for artists: CwF+RtB (Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy = $$). You can read numerous ways this principle is making artists money in Techdirt’s Case Studies. Although Free works aren’t a prerequisite for this model, they work perfectly with it.

9. Let go. There is no time limit; once your work is Free, it can be discovered and “catch on” at any time. There are no guarantees of success in the arts. You’ve done your part: you’ve removed one large obstacle, by removing copy restrictions. The rest is up the the wider world. Now is a good time to think about your next piece of art!
   How Do I Get Fans?

   By putting your work out there. Make the art you want to see, and share it. Be patient. It may take a while. The most important thing you can do at this stage is focus on your art, making the art you want to make, and Freeing it to the best of your ability so that others, sooner or later, can find it and share it with the next potential fan.

Written by Lloyd Kaufman with Sara Antill. Lloyd Kaufman is founder of Troma Films. His most recent book, “Sell Your Own Damn Movie!” is now available in paperback. This article is cross-posted from IndieWIRE. –NP

_{The cover of Lloyd Kaufman’s recent book, “Sell Your Own Damn Movie!”}

I met a Troma fan in Florida a few years ago who told me how he used to get eight Netflix DVDs at a time, keep them for a day or two while he downloaded them to his computer and then return them for eight more. Once he had the digital files, he would make copies for his friends, asking about $2 for the cost of the blank DVD and the effort.

One night, while extremely high, he had figured out that, based on the number of movies he had copied and the penalty for each one, if caught, he would owe the government about $2.5 million in fines and face the rest of his life in prison.

Now, for someone who had already sold himself to the government in the form of federal student loans for film school, the prospect of an extra $2.5 million was pretty frightening. He gave up the pirate DVD business and started selling weed instead, as there were fewer risks involved. That was how we met. Last I heard, he was in jail for selling drugs, but he’ll be out sooner than if he had been caught selling $2 DVDs of “I Know Who Killed Me” to his friends.

Thomas Jefferson would have been appalled at this story. And not just because I think he would have liked trashy Lindsay Lohan movies. But because Thomas Jefferson believed that all art should belong to the public. For him, public domain was a large, thriving democracy, while copyright was a fat king thousands of miles away eating puddings and meat pies.

Unfortunately, we have reversed this with current law. Now copyright is king, while public domain has been relegated to obscurity. Thomas Jefferson, who was against copyright and said himself, “Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property,” finally agreed to compromise and include the issue of patents (and, by interpretation, copyright law) in the Constitution:

The Congress shall have Power … To promote the Progress of Science
and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

First of all, let’s understand that authors meant writers. No heavy metal singer or filmmaker was assumed to be covered under this law. And by “limited times,” Jefferson meant 14 years. That meant that if you invented something or wrote a book, you had 14 years to make back the money that you spent and make a profit. After that, the invention or work would become part of the public domain and other people would be able to improve on it.

That’s exactly what happened when Edison didn’t secure an international patent for his early film projector! Everyone in Europe, including those smarter and more passionate than Edison, had the opportunity to improve on his design and create the film industry that we know and love today!

In fact, while Edison was shooting his films in New Jersey, some bright folks had the idea to get out of New Jersey and New York and head to California to make their movies. It wasn’t because they loved the beach; it was because they wanted to be farther away from Edison so he would have a harder time enforcing his patents.

And there’s the irony—the entire Hollywood studio system was based on evading patent law, yet now they are the strictest enforcers! They are the ones suing sweaty prepubescent fanboys (and their parents) for downloading copies of “The Hurt Locker”!

Once patent and copyright law had been written into the Constitution, it was decided that everything created before the law would be considered public domain. That’s why the writings of Plato and Homer are free for anyone to use.

But considering that the ancient Greeks created democracy and civilization, you would think they would have created copyright law if they had wanted to. The fact that they didn’t makes me think they would have supported truly independent art. In fact, I may start calling myself a modern-day Socrates!* ( Like Socrates, I want to drink poison and die. But unlike Socrates, I am a chicken. Or at least a (Night of the) Chicken (Dead). (Shameless plug.)

So with Jefferson’s 14-year copyright, everything seemed fine. But then a man named Walt Disney created a little shit named Mickey Mouse, and everything changed.

HOW MICKEY MOUSE BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THOMAS JEFFERSON

In 1928, Mickey Mouse appeared in the first sound-synchronized cartoon, Steamboat Willie , which was a parody (in Disnenglish, a copyright infringement) of a Buster Keaton film, “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” Mickey Mouse became an instant star and Walt Disney’s meal ticket. By 1956, when “Steamboat Willie” was all set to enter the public domain, Disney had become a powerhouse corporation, and it interceded on little Mickey’s behalf:

Disney Executive: You see, Senator, if “Steamboat Willie” were to belong to the public, they would pretty much own Mickey Mouse, too. And we can’t let that happen.

Senator: No, no. We must protect Mickey.

Disney Executive: What we need, Senator, is an extension of the copyright law. That way, we can keep Mickey safe.

Senator: Yes, yes. We must protect Mickey.

Disney Executive: Yes, Senator, we must protect Mickey.

The Disney executive puts away his hypnotist materials, leaves a pile of cash on the table, and leaves. The hypnotized senator wakes up with the overwhelming urge to protect Mickey Mouse. Days later, copyright law is extended.

Buster Keaton, however, continues to receive food stamps.

This scene is repeated in 1984 and 2003. “Steamboat Willie” will remain the intellectual property of Disney until 2023, almost 100 years after it was created and many, many years after the last person who worked on it became snail food. And at some point before 2023, I’m guessing the copyright laws will be extended once again.

An interesting little twist to this whole story, which was sent to me by steamboat4eva@hotmail.com, is that someone at Disney discovered in the 1990s that “Steamboat Willie” may actually be in the public domain already. This was due to a mistake in the wording of the original copyright. A law student at Arizona State University investigated this claim and agreed. Then another law student at Georgetown wrote another paper confirming the claim. At this point, Disney threatened to sue the student and the claim hasn’t been uttered since.

I’m not advocating breaking the law. I can’t, because then if you do break the law, you can come back and say, “Kaufman told me to,” and that would be a gigantic goiter in the ass for me.

So I’m not telling you to become a pirate and break the law. What I am saying is what we need is to once again make public domain the Earth and demote copyright to a dwarf planet.

_{NOTE FROM LLOYD’S ASSISTANT: I don’t think you need to say this, since filmmakers didn’t exist at this point.}

_{**LLOYD’S RESPONSE: I’m still operating under the theory that film was invented by the Chinese thousands of years ago.}

_{****ASSISTANT’S RESPONSE: Whatever. Lloyd sucks balls.}

_{******NOTE FROM FOOTNOTE GUY: Uh, should I take this out? Whatever, fuck it. I think Lloyd sucks balls, too.}