Some Hows and Whys of Free Culture

from the I'm-talking!-again! dept

Tue, Sep 21st 2010 9:30pm — Nina Paley

On July 16th I gave at talk at H.O.P.E. (Hackers On Planet Earth) called "Sita Sings the Blues: a Free Culture Success Story." 9 Minutes of excerpts are below, in which I discuss why I insisted on authentic songs, what is and is not property, how software is culture, the difference between Share Alike (copyleft) and other Creative Commons licenses, why I paid to legally license the old songs, how noncommercial copyright infringement is still illegal, legal costs, benefits of audience sharing & decentralized distribution, the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire (sitasingstheblues.com/store), open-licensed merch, audience goodwill, how fans support artists, rivalrous vs. non-rivalrous goods, the Creator Endorsed Mark, migrating Flash files to open formats, gift income, commerce without monopolies, why I encourage legal sharing, and more.

For those with longer attention spans, you can watch the entire unedited hour-long talk. It includes even more topics like Minute Memes, cultural lineages, combining vs. originating, many Ramayanas, our impoverished Public Domain, understanding Free Culture, Content vs. Containers, and a more detailed income breakdown of the Sita Free Distribution Project.

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Filed Under: free culture, nina paley

11 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 21 Sep 2010 @ 10:52pm

Migration tools from raster to vector.

Autotrace and XaraExtreme

Tool to transform flv into images:

ffmpeg
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Anonymous Coward, 21 Sep 2010 @ 11:00pm

e.g.:

ffmpeg -i movie.mpg -f image2 -vcodec mjpeg menu%d.jpg

Source:
http://www.ffmpeg.org/faq.html#SEC15

Also you can transform single images into a movie again.

3.2 How do I encode single pictures into movies?
http://www.ffmpeg.org/faq.html#SEC14

There I have done my good deed of the day.
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Auditrix (profile), 22 Sep 2010 @ 12:07am

Sita didn't cite her costs
The figures cited by Sita were unlabeled. Are they revenues or profit?

Most importantly, Sita didn't cite her costs. Unlike most film profit accountings, Sita's totaled one year. You can only determine project profitability with an inception-to-date accounting. Not to mention, if you included the prior period, there may be a lot more costs!
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Auditrix (profile), 22 Sep 2010 @ 12:10am

Re: Sita didn't cite her costs
My references to "Sita" above should be replaced with "Ms. Paley." I regret the error.
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Anonymous Coward, 22 Sep 2010 @ 12:57am

Re: Sita didn't cite her costs
This is clearly wrong accounting. How can make a movie a positive balance? Hollywood accounting requires massive losses, at least $100M. The data is clearly fake.
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btrussell (profile), 22 Sep 2010 @ 7:00am

Re: Sita didn't cite her costs
"Unlike most film profit accountings, Sita's totaled one year. You can only determine project profitability with an inception-to-date accounting."

You mean they don't spread their expenses over the 140 years they expect to profit...?(Or however long copyright is. You know, the matching of expenses to the profit received from those expenditures.)
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IronM@sk, 22 Sep 2010 @ 10:47pm

Re: Sita didn't cite her costs
Oh Auditrix you just got wtfpwned by the two above me. OMG there is a new way of thinking that my expensive college degree doesn't cover! Does Nina have to cite her costs if the net gain was her happiness? I had some respect for you since you were actually game enough to have a profile here (and because you are cute), but you pretty much lost it with that comment.
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Auditrix (profile), 30 Sep 2010 @ 1:47am

Re: Re: Sita didn't cite her costs
The data have not been presented.
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Auditrix (profile), 30 Sep 2010 @ 1:48am

Re: Re: Sita didn't cite her costs
No.
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Auditrix (profile), 30 Sep 2010 @ 1:51am

Re: Re: Sita didn't cite her costs
Nina cited some numbers and it is unclear what they represent.
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lrobbo (profile), 12 Jun 2012 @ 10:34am

TLDR. Attention span too short . . .
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