by 2 comments on "Free Culture, Book Freedom: Prof. Gabriella Coleman of NYU"

Professor Gabriella Coleman

Over the last couple of years, book piracy has gone from a furtive, limited activity to something approaching a political movement.

If you’re not familiar with what’s been going on in the world of online book sharing, or how it relates to the larger free culture movement, there are two recent interviews with Prof. Gabriella Coleman of New York University worth listening to:

In the Radio Berkman interview, listen especially for the section starting at 4:40:

“Digital piracy online has produced a commons. I mean let’s talk about book piracy today. It is unbelievable, the amount of books being shared, combined with, in the case of aaaarg, discussion. There’s actually a community. But it’s illegal, full on, right? And so there’s definitely this legal commons and illegal commons, and I do think it’s important to recognize the … similarities and differences. In some ways, the pirate commons is valuable precisely because of its transgression, and its message that sometimes the law is overbearing, and legal solutions, even lauadable ones like Creative Commons, are not simply enough. And so from my … more activist perspective, I think a healthy ecology has both legal and illegal … modes of organizing, as opposed to playing a politics of the ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ modes of sharing.”

The interviews are a clear-headed and provocative explanation of what’s happening with books now. She compares it to the earlier revolution in digital music sharing and to the free software movement, and discusses how people’s attitudes about this kind of sharing are changing, and why.

(I normally don’t use the word “piracy” to refer to sharing, but Prof. Coleman makes the point that, unlike “theft”, there is a tradition of “piracy” being used by both proponents and opponents of the activity.)

by 8 comments on "How Big are Books?"

If you’re building a book scanner (such as a Decapod or BookLiberator), you might find this information useful:

Graph showing distribution of book sizes, with sweet spot at 30cm.

Summary: after surveying 6.7 million books, 30cm seems to be the sweet spot — if your scanner can handle that, then you should be able to scan most books.

Raw data courtesy of the Internet Archive, which hosts book data supplied by the Library of Congress and the Open Library project. See LC’s “Books All” files (to 2006), and the Open Library’s JSON data dump (which includes information from libraries other than LC, from Amazon, etc). The LC data is in MARC format with the size in centimeters in field 300 $c. The OL data has size in the ‘physical_dimensions’ field, in centimeters except as otherwise specified (e.g., “11 x 9.4 x 0.7 inches”).

by 7 comments on "Guest Blogger: “ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe”"

Thomas Jefferson

QuestionCopyright.org welcomes Guest Blogger Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of republicanism in the United States.

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors.

It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society.

It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.

Originally written 13 Aug. 1813
Re-blogged from The Founders’ Constitution
Volume 3, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8, Document 12

by 0 comments on "NYC Re/Mixed Media Festival 2010: Paying it forward"

Re/Mixed NYC 2010

A new film festival is starting up in New York City, and it’s friendly to Free Culture:

“The Re/Mixed Media Festival celebrates remix as a legitimate, responsible form of visual art by bringing together filmmakers, video remixers and mashup artists to display their works publicly. The festival will be held in Brooklyn, NY in May of 2010… We are currently soliciting films that utilize remix/mashup techniques, and that are under 10 minutes in length. Additionally, your film should comply with the following guidelines:

  1. Remix does not mean stealing someone else’s work and claiming it as your own, but using it to create a work that is substantially different from the appropriated work, even if it depends heavily on it.
  2. The materials used in the remix should be either owned by the artist, granted permission from use from the creator, licensed under a creative commons license which allows such use, in the public domain, or fall within the parameters of the Fair Use doctrine of U.S. Copyright Law.
  3. Attribution for works used will be given where required.
  4. To be considered for the festival, submitted works must be freely redistributable, except as limited by source material restrictions.

(Emphasis added.)

It’s very encouraging to see point 4! That’s “freely” as in “freedom”, if my brief conversation about it with with Tom Tenney, one of the organizers of the festival, is any guide. It’s great that the festival is ensuring that the works they show be freely useable by others — remix artists, of all people, understand the importance of this. And as the Sita Distribution Project is showing, being pro-sharing can actually help the artists economically.

About point 2 the festival has no choice, of course. Current law gives grants monopolies on culture; we all have to work with that as best we can, until we can change the law.

Point 1 is interesting: it seems to imply a danger that a remixer might accidentally (or on purpose?) get credit for someone else’s work. Does that really happen often in practice? I would think not, but maybe the remix community has had some bad experiences…

by 5 comments on "Sketching is copying; copying is stealing. Coming soon: no breathing."

artists

This may be old news for art students, but for the rest of us it’s still kind of amazing to see cultural institutions like museums buying into the “copying is stealing” myth by prohibiting sketching.

In some cases, the copying restrictions are imposed by a lender — it would be interesting to know how often the lender imposes restrictions on works that are not under copyright, or that would not otherwise be restricted.

Nina Paley collected some examples after the jump. Know any others?

  • Philadelphia Museum of Art: “All sketching in exhibition galleries or of works of art on loan is prohibited.”

    From the wording, that applies to any work on loan, whether in the public domain or not. Someone started a petition to get this restriction lifted, but it doesn’t seem to have succeeded.

  • Royal Ontario Museum: “Sketching may be prohibited for some special exhibitions, due to contractual agreements with lending institutions or individuals.”

    It would be nice if they posted those agreements on the wall, next to the other information about the work. (And if lenders don’t want it posted, then maybe they should ask themselves why.)

  • Morris Museum of Art: “Sketching artwork in the museum’s permanent galleries for educational purposes is allowed. Sketching or drawing from art within the Morris Museum of Art for the purpose of resale or reproduction is strictly prohibited. … Additional restrictions may be placed on sketching paintings and objects on loan from other museums. Please check with a visitor services representative before sketching in the galleries. You will be asked to sign a permission-to-sketch form and comply with the museum’s policies stated within it.”

    Where to start? Resale or reproduction is strictly prohibited? One wonders how the curators at the Morris Museum received their art education. Did they manage to personally visit every museum where a work of art they wanted to see was displayed? And a “permission-to-sketch” form — the word “Orwellian” is overused, but sometimes nothing else will do. Just be glad you’ve already signed your permission-to-think form.

  • National Gallery of Victoria (Australia): Sketching and notetaking are permitted in Temporary Exhibitions and Permanent collection areas of the National Gallery of Victoria. This policy is subject to the discretion of individual or institutional lenders to temporary exhibitions provided the following conditions are met: … It is important to note that some individual or institutional lenders may forbid sketching and note taking as part of the conditions of loan set out in loan agreements and/or exhibition contracts or are not allowed under the terms of a government indemnity or insurance policy. In these instances, the Exhibitions Manager will issue separate instructions to security staff. We ask that all visitors to understand that in these circumstances the NGV has no option but to abide by the conditions determined by lenders.

    Of all the policies here, this one seems the most rational. The full text shows that they’re mainly concerned about crowding and logistics, and when it comes to restrictions by lenders, the gallery more or less openly admits that it regrets that restrictions are ever necessary. This policy apparently results in part from a protest by the free pencil movement — congratulations to them for a successful protest. Again, I hope the National Gallery will post the exact text of lender-requested restrictions right next to the covered works.

The copying-is-stealing mentality can create some awfully strange situations. This 2005 post at BoingBoing is about a sketcher (a second-grader) at the North Carolina Museum of Art: “A museum guard told Julia’s parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.” Don’t worry Julia, you’re not alone.

by 0 comments on "EFF “Hall of Shame” Highlights Copyright Used as Censorship"

EFF Hall of Shame   censorship

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just unveiled their Takedown Hall of Shame, which highlights examples of copyright law being used to suppress political commentary and creative expression. Many of the examples involve abuses of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), whose takedown provisions encourage Internet hosting companies to remove content on the mere assertion of infringement by a copyright holder.

The EFF’s list focuses on corporate takedown notices, but it’s important to understand that it’s not only corporations that suppress speech via copyright law. The copyright monopoly system encourages people to do it to each other too; we’ve collected some examples of that.

So what’s the solution?

The real solution is radical reform of copyright law (there are plenty of alternatives). But even without that, there’s still an easy solution: fix the DMCA to have a penalty for delivering improper takedown notices. Say, a penalty of five years off the copyright term of the covered work, for each wrong notice sent about that work. Content monopolists would start being a lot more careful if they had something to lose when they get a takedown notice wrong.

by 0 comments on "At the Association of Moving Image Archivists Conference, Nov. 5-7"

AMIA Conference 2009   panel

UPDATE: slides from the presentation are now available: problem-of-open-media.pdf or problem-of-open-media.odp (OpenDocument Presentation format).

Any copyright reformers in St. Louis? I’ll be attending the annual conference of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) in St. Louis from Nov. 5th-7th, as will QuestionCopyright.org board members Jeff Ubois and Brewster Kahle.

On Saturday, Nov. 7th, from 10:45-11:45am, I’ll be on a panel entitled The Problem of Open Media, organized by Jack Brighton of Illinois Public Media, with Rick Prelinger (Prelinger Library & Archives), Suzanne M. Fischer (the Henry Ford), and Peter Kaufman (Intelligent Television).

It might be clarifying to call the panel “The Problem of Closed Media” or “The Problem of Monopolized Content”… but then, perhaps that’s exactly the sort of discussion to save for the panel! It should be a good session. Here’s the description:

The term ‘Open Media’ has gained currency with the explosion of online archives. Some media collections are open for people to download, share, mashup, and reuse. Others seek to prevent their works from being copied. To the extent that there is an “open media community,” it envisions a large and active public media commons, providing global access to historical, cultural, and other materials relevant, and in many cases vital, to the public interest. Meanwhile, copyright and intellectual property laws add layers of confusion and conflicting interests, while new technologies make controlling and monetizing media problematic for all concerned. How might we solve the problem of open media? This session will address some of the obstacles and opportunities, and suggest new business models that allow content to breathe freely while still paying the rent. We’ll also discuss the role of the archivist as key to an open media future.

Many thanks to Jack Brighton for putting it together.

Copyright has made it increasingly difficult to do what archivists do, as Jeff Ubois knows firsthand from his experiences in television archiving. I’m looking forward to gathering hearing some more stories at the conference, from those on the front lines.

–Karl Fogel

by 0 comments on "Criminalizing the normal normalizes the criminal."

Copyright Holders Might Prefer Piracy   panel

There’s a very interesting article over at TechRadar about how draconian copyright infringement penalties actually give copyright monopoly holders a motivation to encourage infringement:

In a somewhat cynical table-turning exercise, a German anti-piracy body seems to be encouraging illegal downloading of music and other media in an effort to strong-arm money out of lawbreakers.

DigiRights Solutions (DRS) from Darmstadt has circulated a presentation to potential clients explaining how they might make more money by pursuing illegal filesharers than from regular, legal sales. …

This was inevitable, really. It’s a kind of reverse tort law: if the penalty for a single infringement is a sufficiently high multiple of the price of a legal acquisition, and most people will pay up without fighting, then it makes more sense for the monopoly holders to try for infringement penalties in the first place.

We often hear people say “Look, copyright may not be perfect, but there would be lots of unintended consequences if we just did away with it or replaced it with attribution laws. You can’t predict everything that would happen!” Indeed, no one can. Our response has always been that there are unintended consequences either way, but that therefore it makes most sense to start from a position of no monopoly and no censorship. This lovely development should put to rest any doubts that there unintended consequences to copyright enforcement just as much as there are to copyright reform.

by 0 comments on "“We Are Creators Too”: Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge Interviews Nina Paley"

Public Knowledge (Logo)

We Are Creators Too (Video)

Art Brodsky of Public Knowledge interviewed Nina Paley about copyright restrictions and her experiences trying to get her film Sita Sings the Blues past the copyright gatekeepers. The original interview is at “We Are Creators Too. Part 1 of 4. Today, Nina Paley’s Story”, part of the PK TV Series. We had it transcribed:

Art Brodsky: So this is Art Brodsky from Public Knowledge. We’re here with Nina Paley, who created a fabulous film called Sita Sings the Blues, which Roger Ebert raved about, and you can watch online but, unfortunately, not in a movie theater.

Nina Paley: No, no, you can watch it in a movie theater.

Art Brodsky: Oh, we can? Where?

Nina Paley: Yes.

Art Brodsky: Oh, good! Catch us up with what’s going on.

Nina Paley: Okay, so it’s having a very limited theatrical release. It’s legal. It’s totally legal, and there’s some confusion as to why I released it under the Creative Commons Share Alike license. If I had not paid off the licensors  —  that’s a polite way to refer to them, the “licensors”  —  it would not have been legal for me to offer the film for free download. I could have gone to jail for five years even for giving away for free.

It still would have been copyright infringement. So I’m not giving it away for free in order to not pay the licensing fees. I had to pay the fees in order to do that. Having done that, it’s completely legal, and because it’s completely legal, it’s like, well, I’ve got 35-millimeter prints, I’ll show them in cinemas! So it’s having an art house release, a very slow, gradual and unadvertised art house release.

Art Brodsky: So let’s back up a little bit. You became known as much for the quality of the film, which is fabulous, with your own animation and the Indonesian shadow puppets or shadow figures and the Indian stuff, as for the copyright issues that you encountered, and this is because you used some music from 1927. Is that right?

Nina Paley: Yes, 1927, 1928. Annette Hanshaw, the recordings of which are in the public domain everywhere in the world except possibly New York State, so at some point I may have to ban the film in New York State. We’ll see how that goes, but I figure most of the world is outside of New York State. And, of course, the real problem was the songs, the lyrics that underlie the recordings.

Art Brodsky: Right. The recordings are [out of copyright], but you ran into this thing called sync rights.

Nina Paley: Yes, sync licenses. I had thought naïvely  —  granted, naïve  —  that because covers  —  there was no  —  I guess I had been thinking like these songs are available as audio. Like lots of people have recorded them, so I was thinking, “Well, the compositions and lyrics, that can’t be that difficult to use.” What I didn’t know was that it’s legal to release them on albums, it’s legal to release the sound, but once you put a picture to that, that’s not legal anymore and that’s not regulated by the government, and the licensors are free to charge anything they want. And they did their best, you know. They came up with a number, $220,000.00 approximately. That was their estimate. That’s their like little, tiny, independent feature filmmaker amount, and I couldn’t afford it.

Art Brodsky: So what eventually happened with that?

Nina Paley: I should mention all this went through intermediaries because they wouldn’t actually talk to me directly. They would  —  they only have time to  —  they’re very busy because the system is  —  it’s a crazy system, right? (Laughter) Like you need  —  everybody has to ask you permission. There’s only so much time to grant permission, so they don’t have time to talk to everybody who comes to them. They only make time to talk to paid professionals that they have relationships with, so I had to pay a lawyer at first to talk to them, and I ran out of money on that, and…

Art Brodsky: Who is the “them?”

Nina Paley: Warner/Chappell, Sony… There’s a whole list at Sita’s  — 

Art Brodsky: Yeah, on your Web site you list all the licenses that you had to get, which is quite amazing.

Nina Paley: Yeah. Actually, why don’t I just go there since we’re all here? Hang on a second. Okay, so the great question of who owns culture. Warner/Chappell, the biggest one. I can even tell you  —  I might allow  —  no, I think. That’s the thing. Like I’m not supposed to  —  I got these contracts and one of the terms of the contracts is you’re not allowed to reveal the terms of the contracts.

Art Brodsky: Ah, or else they’d have to kill you.

Nina Paley: Well, the thing is you’re supposed to  —  you must reveal the terms of the contracts to the distributor, but you’re not supposed to reveal them to anybody else, but the thing is the public is my distributor. So I have to reveal the terms of the contract to the people who are distributing my film, which is everyone, especially because if they want to sell DVDs, they have to pay these extra licenses. I want to make sure that they get paid, right? I mean I have to comply with the law. That’s the law. I signed a thing that said they’re gonna get paid, so I have to let people know how much to pay these corporations if they want to sell Sita DVDs. But, anyway, I can tell you the licensors are mostly Warner/Chappell, EMI Music Publishing, Sony ATV Music Publishing, Songwriter’s Guild of America, Williamson Music, Cromwell Music, Memory Lane Music and Bug Music. Most of it is held by Warner/Chappell, Sony, Williamson. Yeah, those are the ones.

Art Brodsky: And those are for the songs from 1927 which should be in the public domain.

Nina Paley: Yeah. They were supposed to be in the public domain at the very, very latest by the ’80s, but they didn’t quite make it. If they had been from 1922, it would have been okay, but they just  —  Congress just keeps extending copyright terms, and this is what happens and mostly, you know, one of the obvious results of this is that Annette Hanshaw’s music has become extremely obscure and many people had never heard her songs until they saw this film, which is remarkable, and the only explanation for it is copyright.

[musical interlude]

Nina Paley: And I should even mention that the CDs that have been released of her music all come from outside the United States, because no American audio distributor would want to deal with releasing something that couldn’t be sold in New York State. Maybe. They just don’t want to deal with it. So every other country in the world has more access to American cultural heritage than Americans and especially New Yorkers.

Art Brodsky: Yeah. Well, you were warned off of doing music in your film originally, right?

Nina Paley: Yeah. I mean it’s  —  the people in film, they just don’t want to deal with this. It’s like it’s such a mess, and you can put all this work into a film and then have it be illegal and most people respond to this climate by just  —  it’s like just don’t go there. Like don’t touch this. Just don’t. There’s this big gap in music starting in 1923. (Laughter) It’s just not gonna show up in films, certainly not by independent artists. Giant companies can use it. In fact, I was really struck when I was watching Wall-E, the Pixar Disney film, they had these clips from “Hello, Dolly.” And, of course, they can do that ’cause they have, you know, millions and millions of dollars and that’s what it costs. But independents like me, there’s no way we’re gonna be able to do stuff like that.

Art Brodsky: Yeah, that was one of the things that struck me. I was reading one of the interviews that you did and the first comment was, “She should have checked her rights.”

Nina Paley: Yeah.

Art Brodsky: Is there a limit to like one per  —  and you said you’d had a whole team of law students and professors doing this for months, right?

Nina Paley: Yeah, for years actually. I was doing  —  you know, I was doing my best. It’s like you’re not supposed to make a film unless you have millions of dollars to start with, like an enormous part of your budget is supposed to be just legal, which is a real disincentive for independent artists to make film. And we’re in this freaky time where suddenly the technology has become cheap enough and powerful enough so that independents, just ordinary people like me, can make films, but we’re not supposed to. Like there’s this whole legal thing that is supposed to keep us out, and so the technology is beginning to let us in, but the legal system is not.

Art Brodsky: So what has to happen for the legal system to catch up to the technology?

Nina Paley: There are so many things. I mean I think one very simple thing that would help a lot would be to annul these copyright extensions. Copyright was just never supposed to last this long, and the result of it is that you can only comment on or include our shared culture, and the thing is culture builds on culture. It’s a living thing. It’s a lineage. It’s a heritage. And what these copyright extensions have done is made it only legal for the very, very rich to comment on culture. If you have enough money, yeah, you can, you know, put just about anything in your film. If you don’t, you can’t. And so one great thing to do would just be to  —  it’s even a really conservative thing to do  —  just maintain copyrights according to the terms that the works were created in.

I mean another thing is that it’s entirely possible that copyright extensions are violating artists’ moral rights, if they have any. It’s quite likely that a lot of the people that created these works in the ’20s and onwards, when they were signing over the rights, which they had to do in order to be published, they knew that the terms were only 28 years and so that could have been a comfort to them. Like, “Okay, I have to, you know, sign this over to a corporation, but it’s only gonna be 28 years and after 28 years, people can sing my song.”

And then, of course, if the corporation extended that then that would be 56 years and then, you know, with these like unlimited extensions it means never. So it’s entirely possible that had artists known that they wouldn’t have done this or, you know, there’s no way to get the consent of the artists from history to say, “Is it okay if we lock up your work forever and ever?” That really might not have been all right with them.

Art Brodsky: One of the items I read about is that your next project, speaking of copyright, after Sita was going to be some sort of project on copyright and copyright fundamentalism.

Nina Paley: Yes.

Art Brodsky: Tell us about it.

Nina Paley: Here. Here’s my…

[shows her shirt, which says “©ensorship” on the front]

Ta-da! (Laughter) That’s what I think of copyright. (Laughter) Yes, the Minute Memes. QuestionCopyright.org and I wrote out little descriptions of 12 of these little shorts, each of which will have a little song and cartoon, and they each deal with a fundamental aspect, or concept, related really to freedom of speech. They’re not specifically about copyright. They’re about freedom of speech.

Now copyright happens to be the main form of censorship in the West, so if you are concerned about freedom of speech, freedom of expression, you’re naturally gonna be dealing with these concepts that have to do with copyright that are misunderstood. And one of them is called “Copying Isn’t Theft.” And we aim to explain that copying isn’t theft, this radical concept that, yes, that is actually true. We hope to bring the laws of physics back into the discussion of copyrighting. That’s really what it is. The big media industries have been lobbying for so long. They have these massive propaganda campaigns that just say, “Copying is stealing. Copying is stealing. Copying is stealing.” And after enough years, people just go, “Copying is stealing.” It’s not stealing! It’s making another of something. It’s adding; it’s not subtracting (laughter). Copying is good. And I have a little song about that which I’m sure you’re gonna
ask me to sing…

Art Brodsky: Yes. We couldn’t get through this without it, Nina. You know that.

Nina Paley: All right. I’ll try to sing. I’m  —  as you can tell, I’m coughing.

[Singing]

Copying isn’t theft.
Stealing a thing means one less left.
Copying it makes one thing more.
That’s what copying’s for.

Copying isn’t theft.
If I copy yours, you have it, too.
One for me and one for you
That’s what copies can do.

If I steal your bicycle,
you have to take the bus;
but if I just copy it,
there’s one for each of us.

Making more of a thing,
that is what we call copying.
Sharing ideas with everyone,
that’s why copying is fun!

Art Brodsky: Fabulous, fabulous.

Nina Paley: Yes, we need to have this professionally recorded and arranged and  — 

Art Brodsky: And licensed.

Nina Paley: Hopefully  —  yeah, licensed. (Laughter)

Nina Paley: Yeah, it needs to be licensed. It needs to be ShareAlike-licensed.

[intermission animation]

Art Brodsky: Here’s the question. I mean we’re start… we touched on this. You know, copyright doesn’t seem to benefit you at all. It benefits the studios and the big moguls and everything but, you know, you seem to not have any benefit, and you’re theoretically one of the people that’s supposed to be protected by it, right?

Nina Paley: Right. And people keep saying, “Oh, well, copyright, it just comes down to money.” But it doesn’t. It comes down to control. The big studios are not making more money. I don’t think so. I don’t think so  —  I think that the total wealth is limited by copyright. What it does do for big studios, as I mentioned before, is it eliminates competition. When you have a system where only the extremely wealthy can create art or create media, then you shut out this huge number, this vast number of people that now have access to the technology to make that stuff. That’s what it does. It simply makes it not possible for independents to participate in mass culture.

Art Brodsky: Have you come across the orphan works issue in doing either your strips or your cartoons or other things?

Nina Paley: I know about it and because I’m a cartoonist, I know  —  you know, I hear from a lot of cartoonists who are such copyright fundamentalists for the most part. Which is really interesting  —  I think it’s because simply artists are vulnerable and terrified, and we’ve been told for so long that this is our source of power, we  —  you know, of course we want to believe that. We want to believe that we have this kind of power to tell other people what to do, but what we forget is that you need incredibly expensive lawyers. And I actually know small artists that take this gleeful joy in suing someone smaller than them. Like they find like some tiny, tiny little operator, you know, and it’s like, “Ha, ha, I sued them. I got them.” I know an animator who apparently  —  on the streets of New York someone was selling pirated DVDs of his film, and he just grabbed them all off of his table, and he was so proud of himself, you know, so proud of taking the day’s income away from this immigrant (laughter) this poor guy. But, you know, the seller was smaller than him, less powerful than him.

Art Brodsky: Yeah. When you did your shadow figures, were those ones you made up by yourself or were they from someplace else?

Nina Paley: Those are derivative works. Those were derived from designs of existing shadow puppets, traditional shadow puppets that I found in books and photographs and online and whatnot.

Art Brodsky: So you didn’t get into any trouble for those.

Nina Paley: Not yet. I could be, you know. It’s very unlikely. The designs are really traditional, so they’re not  —  they’re  —  it’s very unlikely that the copyrights are registered. On the other hand, I know that the World Intellectual Property Organization is trying to basically privatize all culture, that if we say, “Well, some stuff’s owned and some stuff’s not,” then it’s like, “Oh, well, the problem is that some stuff isn’t owned, so let’s just privatize absolutely everything and how we distribute that.” Well, we won’t… maybe there’ll be some problems there (laughter). We’ll probably distribute it the same way we’ve distributed the  —  you know, all the profits that come from corporate industrialization. (Laughter) We’ll just use that system.

Art Brodsky: Sure. Can we have a copyright-less world, I mean without it at all?

Nina Paley: We did. We did for the entire history of humankind. You know, many  —  most works, most like great works, that people refer to all the time were created, amazingly, without copyright! Beethoven worked without copyright, Bach, you know, like Mozart, Michelangelo… There was no copyright then. And yet somehow they created these brilliant works. How did they do it? They couldn’t do it today. And another thing about these brilliant works is that they’re not disconnected from the culture around them. They all are of their time. You know, perspective was around before Michelangelo. He didn’t invent that. You know, if you look at the whole history of art, there is a kind of evolution to it. You don’t have like cave paintings one day and then Michelangelo the next day. There’s this whole like gradual change in art. I mean it comes and goes. Cultures rise and fall, but artists are actually connected to the culture around them and they learn from other artists.

Art Brodsky: And with no entertainment lawyers in the middle to screw things up.

Nina Paley: Apparently not. Now people can say like, “Oh, well, that was when there were patrons or, you know, then there was the church.” The fact is that there… this gets like really complicated. I recommend reading the book “The Gift” by Lewis Hyde, even though unfortunately it’s copyrighted; hopefully he’ll come around. But artists historically and even currently have been supported by many, many means other than copyright and modern artists, except for perhaps the top, you know, one-half of 1 percent primarily are supported by means other than royalties.

In fact almost every artist I know is supported by some means other than royalties, and I looked at my entire career and realized I was not living  —  you know, that royalties amounted to almost nothing of the money I got. It was mostly commissions, grants, you know, work for hire, which I know is a terrible thing, but most artists do it. And it’s funny that copyright actually  —  copyright in a way makes even more people do work for hire, like they believe that  —  it’s like, “Oh, you shouldn’t do work for hire. You should sell your rights.” That’s the same thing. It’s exactly the same thing, licensing your  —  the rights to your work for a really long period of time. It’s the same thing as doing work for hire. You know, you can’t sell to someone else, you can’t let anybody else use it, you can’t share it, you can’t allow people to share it. That’s work for hire, you know. Your stuff is owned.

Art Brodsky: Well, Nina, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with us today. This has been a fabulous discussion, and I threatened when I saw you in New York to get you involved in stuff down here and this is the first step, but there will be more.

Nina Paley: Okay, I’ll come on down and testify. You can see I like to rant. I can take lessons or something.

Art Brodsky: You do. You can rant very well. We all appreciate that.

Nina Paley: (Laughter) I can also be very calm and sweet and stuff, but not when it comes to copyright.

Art Brodsky: Oh, but we wouldn’t want that.

Nina Paley: Okay, good. Okay, good.

Art Brodsky: You gotta show the artistic passion that’s in there for the films and everything.

Nina Paley: (Laughter) Yeah, I’m very passionate. Thanks very much, Art.

Art Brodsky: Bye.

by 5 comments on "Proposing CC-PRO: A License For Professionals"

What’s the best license for professionals to use? Our fantasy answer is CC-PRO, the Creative Commons license we’d like to see…

CC_webpageheader

CC-PRO logo

Professional work deserves to be recognized.

CC-PRO is a Creative Commons license that meets the specific needs of professional authors, artists, and musicians. CC-PRO uses Creative Commons’ most powerful license to ensure high-quality work goes further and is recognized more. It offers the strongest protection against both plagiarism and censorship. It invites attention, collaboration and recognition from your most important audience: other professionals.

Strongest protection against:
plagiarism
censorship
abusive exploitation

Promotes:
name recognition
income
archiving and preservation
distribution
collaboration with other professionals

Professional work deserves to be recognized. Use CC-PRO.

CC-PRO

 

CC-PRO Icons 2

This page is licensed under a Creative Commons Professional 3.0 License (with thanks to Creative Commons for encouraging remixes of their site).

So what’s CC-PRO?

CC-PRO is CC-ShareAlike, but rebranded. Our point is that it’s the best license for professionals (as well as for everyone else).

The Creative Commons licenses have done artists a great service: they’ve spread the message that freedom is a factor, and that different behaviors can arise if you allow your audience more freedoms.

But more and more, we’ve seen professional artists choose Creative Commons licenses that consign their works to a non-professional ghetto. We’re referring to the Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” family of licenses: licenses that essentially say “Do what you want with this, as long as you don’t make money from it.” While that might at first seem like it simply reserves to the artist the right to use the work professionally, it has the much larger effect of removing the work from most professional contexts entirely. Another way to put it is: if you allow other people to make money using your work, some of that money will find its way to you. Excluding your work from the world of professional activity (except as specifically approved by you) limits its life and limits your audience’s ability to help distribute it. The best license is the one that grants your audience and other artists the same freedoms you have.

Creative Commons has been careful not to recommend any one of their licenses over another for professional artists. The CC mantra has been “choice”, and that may have been a wise course so far, because it lets artists open up this new world at their own pace. But now we’d like to offer a direct answer to the question “Which license should I use?” CC-PRO: the license for professional artists, and the license that treats your audience and fellow artists with the same respect they give you.

(Thanks to Nina Paley for the idea and the remix.)