Nina Paley Argues Why Copyright Is Brain Damage

from the sovereignty-of-your-own-mind dept

We first wrote about Nina Paley in 2009, upon hearing about the ridiculous copyright mess she found herself in concerning her wonderful movie Sita Sings the Blues. While she eventually was able to sort out that mess and release the film, she also discovered that the more she shared the film, the more money she made, and she began to question copyright entirely. She originally released the film under a ShareAlike license, promising to go after people who didn't uphold the ShareAlike parts, but then moved to a full public domain dedication and has become quite vocal in recent years about not supporting any kind of copyright and even raising some important concerns about many forms of Creative Commons licenses.

Paley has also written a bunch of posts for us, including the wonderful "Make Art Not Law" post she wrote about two years ago. Much of the material from that post appears to have morphed into a recent TEDx talk that Paley gave, entitled Copyright is Brain Damage. It's worth watching: Again, it's quite similar to her post from two years ago, but interesting to watch in a different form. While the "brain damage" claim certainly feels (perhaps intentionally) hyperbolic, she's actually making a really important point in calling it that: she notes that the entire mechanism of copyright is to cut off the flow of information, and analogizes that to a brain, noting that when information flow is cut off between sections of the brain, it's a form of brain damage. That's a somewhat extreme view to take, and I'm not sure it's one that I think is a truly fair analogy, but damn if it's not thought provoking.

I've long wished there was a better way to express how much is lost when copyright cuts off an important flow of information -- because it's obvious that it harms creative expression, artwork and innovation. But it's difficult to show what's "lost" when it never was allowed to exist in the first place. The idea of analogizing it to brain damage is a really fascinating one that does, at the very least, present a strong visual image for the kind of harm that can be done when copyright law is abused.

Filed Under: brain damage, copyright, creativity, culture, information flow, nina paley