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.
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.
QCO Artist-in-Residence Nina Paley’s interview with at Baixa Cultura, conducted by email with journalist and photographer André Solnik. The English below is the original; Baixa Cultura translated Nina’s answers.
1. When your interest on free culture has begun?
For a long time I thought copyright terms were too long and the law could use reform, but I didn’t really understand Free Culture until October 2008, after months on the film festival circuit with my then-illegal feature Sita Sings the Blues. Free Culture was too audacious a concept for me to think about clearly until then. One morning I finally got it — freeing my work would be better for the work — and I spent the next half-year preparing for a Free, legal release of SSTB. That finally happened in March 2009, when I finally cleared all the necessary (and bullshit) licenses at a cost of about $70,000 to myself.
2. Tell me in short why artists should free their work. Is it a good choice for both renowned and new artists?
Why should you Free your work? To make it as easy as possible for people to share your work — as easy as possible for your work to reach eyeballs and ears and minds — to reach an audience. And to make it as easy as possible for audience support — including money — to reach you…. Copy restrictionsplace a barrier between you, the artist, and most forms of support. By removing the barriers of copyright, you make it possible to receive money and other kinds of support from your audience, both directly and through distributors, thereby increasing your chances of success.
3. Creative Commons has recently released the final draft of the version 4.0 of its licenses. What changes would you like to see? Do you think CC should keep on supporting the nonfree licenses?
Yes, CC should stop supporting the non-free licenses. What kind of “commons” is that?
4. Although they are probably the most known alternatives to more restrictive ones, they still remain unpopular compared to the “all rights reserved“. Why is that? Do you reckon people get confused by the many possibilities given by the CC licenses?
Most people who use CC licenses don’t understand what the different licenses mean; they just call all of them “Creative Commons” as if that means anything. CC’s modular system was a good idea, I see it as an experiment that was worth doing. But the results are in: it didn’t work. What we have now are a mess of incompatible licenses, most of which fail to contribute to any real “commons,” and an increase of confusion and misinformation.
You can’t really blame Creative Commons though — the problem is copyright law. Nothing can fix it at this point. Even CC-0, a valorous attempt to opt out of copyright, doesn’t work in practice, as my experience with the Film Board of Canada showed — even after placing SSTB under CC-0, their lawyers refused to accept it was really Public Domain, and made me sign a release anyway, just to allow one of their filmmakers to refer to it. I will be saddled forever with permissions paperwork even with CC-0. I’ll probably keep using CC-0, of course, but I have no expectation it will work as it’s supposed to.
5. The BY-NC-SA license, although nonfree, it’s pretty popular. Why do you think so? What are the main issues about licensing a work using it?
People are high-minded when they choose the -NC restriction, but it accomplishes exactly the opposite of their ideals. They want to “protect” their works from abusive exploitation from big corporate players. They don’t realize those big corporate players LOVE the -NC clause, because it’s a commercial monopoly. Big corporate players are all set up to deal with commercial monopolies: they have licensing departments and lawyers. It’s the big corporate players who can afford to license your -NC works. It’s your peers, small players with no legal departments and limited resources, who can’t. The -NC clause screws over your fellow artists and small players, while favoring big corporations.
The way to avoid abusive exploitation is to use CC-BY-SA, a Share-Alike license without the -NC restriction. This allows your peers to use the work without fear, as long as they keep it Free-as-in-Freedom. Big corporate monopoly players, however, are unwilling to release anything Freely: if they want to use your work, they’ll have to negotiate a waiver of the -SA clause. For this they will pay money. It works like a regular licensing deal: for $X you waive the -SA restriction and allow them to re-use the work without contributing to the community. I have had many corporate licensors offer me such contracts, although I didn’t sign any because I was such a Free license booster.
The only reason BY-NC-SA is popular is because people really haven’t thought it through.
6. Money seems to be one of the main worries artists have when they hear someone saying “free your work“. Is this “fear“ justified? Have you recovered all the money spent in the making of Sita Sings the Blues?
7. You have recently announced that SSTB is now in the public domain. Although now you are finally free of burocracy envolving copyright stuff and this action could help your movie to have more visibility, on the other side it could favour restricted modifications of your work (e.g.: a book inspired by SSTB released under “all rights reserved“). How do you weigh these two sides?
Eh, honestly I just don’t care any more. Let’s just put it out there and see what happens. If something terrible happens because I shared freely, I’ll learn from that. But I think it’s stupid to worry about what other people do, and try to control it, especially with broken laws. Even Free Share-Alike licenses require copyright law to be enforced, and copyright law is hopelessly broken. I don’t want to validate or support it in any way.
Licenses are not going to fix our problems. What is fixing our problems is increasing numbers of people simply ignoring copyright altogether. Instead of trying to get people to pay more attention to the law, as CC does, I’d rather encourage them to ignore the law in favor of focusing on the art. Licenses are the wrong solution. Art is the solution. Make art not law.
8. Are you keen on the free software movement as well? Any of your works was made using free softwares?
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 terribly 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.
Update: The account is now unblocked, with this message from Facebook:
I'm so sorry for the inconvenience caused, there was a temporary misconfiguration in our photo review systems which caused a very small subset of users to be incorrectly enrolled in one of our checkpoints. There was no issue with your original photo, we have a combination of automated and human-review systems dedicated to keeping people safe, and a bug caused one of these systems to incorrectly enroll a small number of users into checkpoints.
We have since remedied the issue, and remediated all affected accounts. Please let me know if you or others are still experiencing any difficulties.
Yesterday I posted this adorable photo on Facebook:
Being a cute picture of a cute cat, it got a lot of "likes" and comments. A few hours later I followed up with this photo (accompanying text in the caption):
Another photo of Nut and me. Here you can see in more detail how Nut presses her face as hard as she can into mine. She does this all night, by the way. If I move my face away, she rearranges herself to grip the back of my head as tightly as possible. If I'm face-down on the pillow, she slides her paws under into my eye sockets and mashes her head into my ear. It's very cute but I don't think I could stand it every night.
Shortly thereafter, FB wouldn't let me view my feed, instead giving me this message:
"We noticed you may be posting photos that violate our Community Standards. Help make Facebook better by cleaning up your photos and removing friends that post nudity or other things that violate our standards."
Then it took me directly to all my photos and said,
"To keep your account active, please remove any photos that contain nudity or sexually inappropriate content. Check the box next to each photo you need to remove."
I didn't have a single dirty photo to check, so I checked none and then clicked the box that said, "I have checked all my photos that violate Facebook’s policies." For that, I was rewarded with this:
"Because you uploaded photos that violate our policies, you won't be able to upload photos for 3 days.
"If you have other photos on the site that violate our policies, be sure to remove them immediately or you could be blocked for longer. After this block is lifted, please make sure any photos you upload follow Facebook’s Policies."
Followed by another checkbox that says,
"I understand Facebook's policies and I won't upload any photos that violate these policies."
But I haven't checked that box yet, because I really don't understand Facebook's policies. At all. Maybe Franz Kafka could explain them to me. Can you?
UPDATE: several hours later, I still can’t see my FB home page/news feed. This is what I continue to get instead:
We recently took Jon Taplin to task for his comments insulting Nina Paley's artwork, because he did not agree with her viewpoint that disobeying copyright law for the sake of making new art was a form of "intellectual disobedience." The debate spilled over to Twitter for a while, in which it went a bit all over the map, before Taplin did issue what appears to be a sincere apology, along with a blog post, which he said he hoped would move the debate forward (unfortunately, that blog post contains yet another backhanded slap at Paley's art -- which he calls "what she claims to be art").
That said, since we're always about "moving the debate forward," rather than arguing over old points, we might as well do that -- and Taplin's blog post, does in fact, bring some new things to the debate that are worth discussing. First, though, as a preamble, to those who haven't been a part of "the debate," I might as well catch you up by posting the in-person debate between me and Jonathan that happened a few weeks ago at the Tech Policy Summit (but was only recently posted online). It runs 45 minutes, starting off slow but gets more and more lively as it goes on:
Okay. Now that you're caught up, the Taplin's blog post reasonably asks if we're losing our ability to innovate, as we become more focused on the ease of copying as an alternative. It's an appealing thought, but one that I don't believe survives significant scrutiny. However, let's start at the top. Taplin points to an article called Infinite Stupidity by evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel. It makes some very interesting arguments, talking about evolution, and wonders if humans are evolving away from being innovative. The basis of this is as follows:
If I'm living in a population of people, and I can observe those people, and see what they're doing, seeing what innovations they're coming up with, I can choose among the best of those ideas, without having to go through the process of innovation myself. So, for example, if I'm trying to make a better spear, I really have no idea how to make that better spear. But if I notice that somebody else in my society has made a very good spear, I can simply copy him without having to understand why.
What this means is that social learning may have set up a situation in humans where, over the last 200,000 years or so, we have been selected to be very, very good at copying other people, rather than innovating on our own. We like to think we're a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves.
Now, why wouldn't we want to do that? Why wouldn't we want to innovate on our own? Well, innovation is difficult. It takes time. It takes energy.
The fear then, is that, as a species, we become "docile copiers" rather than innovators. In fact, as he later argues (in the paragraph that Taplin highlights on his blog), Pagel questions if the internet is leading to a situation where "copiers are probably doing better than innovators" because we don't have to innovate to get by. It's an interesting theory from an evolutionary perspective, but not one borne out by economics or history, unfortunately, which have studied this particular issue much more closely. Of course, throughout history there are numerous examples of people insisting that we had reached the pinnacle of innovation and there was nothing more to be done. And every time, they're proven not just wrong, but laughably so.
Innovation may be "hard," but it's also incredibly rewarding. If you want to read a very long, but absolutely fascinating and worthwhile book on the subject, I highly recommend Robert Friedel's awesome A Culture of Improvement, which looks at the last thousand years of innovation to understand why do we innovate. The key finding? That we improve because we see a better way of doing things.
But -- and this is the key point -- the way that you see "a better way of doing things" is not to invent something new from scratch. But to see something -- and, often to copy it and then to improve upon it. We, as a species, are always looking to improve. The argument that Facebook has made people perfectly docile suggests little understanding of what happens on Facebook all the time. Even just looking at Facebook alone, there are constant complaints about how it works, with suggestions on how to make it better. There are still companies launching new and different social networks, believing they can do it better.
Is there some copying going on? Yes, absolutely, but there's no real reason to just copy for the sake of copying. It's only if you can do it better. In fact, as the (also excellent) book by Oded Shenkar, Copycats explained, copying is often a very useful strategic weapon in figuring out how to innovate. What Shenkar's work showed was that there is value in copying, but not merely for copying's sake, but to take what's been done, not to re-invent the wheel, but then to do the incremental improvements on it that can make all the difference in the world.
Going back to Nina Paley. Taplin suggests that her "art" is barely art at all, because she is one of those "docile copiers," and thus not innovating. But this suggests a near total ignorance of Paley's work, an incredibly innovative film, which you can see right here:
Is Nina copying? Well, it tells a variation on a classic Indian story, combined with a modern story of the main character's own struggles. It also cleverly weaves in the music of Annette Hanshaw. Is there "copying" going on there? Sure, there are elements of copying, but it's all for the sake of innovating. There is no way to watch that and claim that it is mere "docile copying." Nina had a story to tell, and sought to tell it in a very innovative way. The story had certainly never been told this way. And tons of people have enjoyed the movie because of that innovation. If it were just a copy of "the same old story" people would not have enjoyed it.
And that, really, is what happens all the time. Copying is there -- and it can make people upset -- but it's a key natural resource in the process of innovation. And that's not just a random statement. As the research of many economists have suggested, it is the very nature of copying that leads to economic growth. Why? Because a copy increases the pie. Where once you had "one" copy of the resource, now you have two. And so on. It expands the pie, and makes it more possible to do things, such as innovating.
Caltech professor Carver Mead once talked about how, when things become abundant we have an obligation -- not just a possibility, but an obligation -- to waste that which is abundant. And that is because it creates new opportunities and expands the world and innovation even further. What is more abundant than what can be copied?
So, all of this fear of "docile copying" is, I believe, misplaced. All of that copying is generating the expanding natural resource base for further innovation, as people continue to build on that culture of improvement by saying, "hey, I can do that better." Innovation may be hard, but when the resources are abundant, it cannot be stopped. It is our nature to seek to make things better, and when we share ideas and build and copy on our way to making things better, it is the inevitable progress that we find at the end.
I'm glad that Jonathan brought up this subject and is seeking to move this debate and discussion forward, and I look forward to continuing the back and forth -- hopefully on friendlier terms.
Over the years, we've posted tons and tons of stories of content creators embracing the internet, exploring the new opportunities it creates and often profiting greatly from doing so. We regularly celebrate the great creativity from these artists, and cheer them on as they succeed and (sometimes) make lots of money. And yet... there is a certain contingency out there who keeps insisting that we "hate" artists, or alternatively, that we have no respect for artists. This is bizarre. I adore artists and creativity. Part of the reason we spend so much time here discussing new business models and opportunities is that we want more artists to succeed. I have trouble understanding why that's so bad. At best, it seems to be a case of shooting the messenger. In order to embrace these new models it helps to recognize that the old models just aren't that good anymore. And that gets some people upset. So they shake their fist at the sky... and blame us because we tell them that having an umbrella might be a good idea.
But one thing I find most troubling in all of this is that the very same people who constantly yell and scream about how we don't respect artists almost always make sure to mock and denigrate the quality of artists who do succeed these days. Take, for example, Jonathan Taplin, who (for reasons that escape me and many others) is the head of an "innovation lab" at USC, despite an apparent lack of understanding of the very basics of innovation. Instead, he pines for a historical fictional world that never existed. We wrote about some of his bizarre claims a few months ago. A few weeks ago, I was able to debate Jonathan at the Tech Policy Summit. Video of that should be going up soon, but it was more of the same. Taplin didn't have the facts on his side (he repeatedly made statements that were out-and-out false) and once he was called on it, he resorted to personal insults directed at me.
Taplin, in the past, has directly accused me of not respecting artists. But, then, we recently had a blog post about filmmaker Nina Paley and how she's dealing with the fact that copyright laws -- if obeyed -- would hold back her own creativity. And, rather than "respect" artists, or even engage in any form of serious debate, Taplin went on a Twitter rampage tossing insults at Nina and the quality of her work. First, he called her talentless:
Text: @techdirt. Only someone as talentless as Nina Paley would excuse theft. She can't even give her work away. Revenge of the nerds
Then he called her thoughts on the matter "half-witted":
And finally, he made this confusing statement, which is similar to one he emailed me about how (in his head) my vision of the world is one in which we were all forced to watch videos of cats rather than Hollywood movies:
Text: If @ninapaley gets her way we will be forced to watch crap like Bob, The Angry Flower. The Revenge of the talentless Nerds
First of all, nearly everything he says is wrong. Nina Paley can and does give her work away. You can (and, if you haven't already, should) go watch her excellent movie, Sita Sings the Blues. And, contrary to what he'd have you believe (that no one could possibly make money giving away content for free), Nina does make money. Finally, I'm really at a loss as to how one would ever be "forced" to watch anything they didn't want to watch. In fact, these days, with such a massive explosion in choice, the idea that anyone would ever be a captive audience forced to watch something they didn't like just doesn't make any sense.
But the larger point is this unfortunate trend that we've seen, exemplified by Taplin's childish outburst here. The people who keep claiming that those of us seeking real solutions don't "respect" artists when we cheer and celebrate their successes and praise their artwork and creativity -- always seem to be the same people who mock and insult those very same artists' work for being successful. It's one thing to criticize their ideas. That's perfectly reasonable. But to take it a step further and insult their abilities as an artist is really quite shameful. And that's doubly true when you're talking about someone who is a public figure like Taplin, a representative for USC. Is this really the face that USC wants to show to the world as its "director" of an "innovation lab"? Someone who mocks an artist and attacks her talent?
Nina Paley (filmmaker, activist, occasional Techdirt contributor, and many other things) has given an interesting interview with O'Reilly's Mac Slocum, in which she talks about the concept of "intellectual disobedience" -- merging "intellectual property" with "civil disobedience." Nina argues that if you believe in creating and sharing culture these days, copyright infringement is almost necessary, and people shouldn't apologize for it, but should stand up for what they're doing:
"A lot of people infringe copyright and they're apologetic ... If you know as much about the law as, unfortunately, I do, I cannot claim ignorance and I cannot claim fair use ... I know that I'm infringing copyright and I don't apologize for it."
The phrase "intellectual disobedience" has a call-to-arms ring to it, but Paley characterized it as an introspective personal choice driven by a need to create. "It's important for me as an artist to make art, and the degree of self-censorship that is required by the law is too great," Paley said. "In order to have integrity as a human being and as an artist, I guess I'm going to be conscientiously violating the law because there's no way to comply with the law and remain a free human being."
There's much more in the full interview:
I have to admit that I'm a little bit torn by this concept. I certainly think that each individual needs to make their own decisions about what they do when creating, but my general approach has been to avoid infringement wherever possible, and focus on convincing creators that being open and encouraging others to build on their works has tremendous benefits in both the short- and long-terms. At the same time, however, I can see where Nina is coming from as an artist who feels restricted. And that's a major concern. When the laws are holding back what artists can do to express themselves, that seems incredibly troubling. So many people have this unfortunate view that if someone builds on someone else's work (even though that's the very basis for pretty much all of human culture), something has been taken away from culture or society. The truth is the opposite: building on someone else's work expands culture, and does so in fascinating ways. It both creates something new, but also often generates new interest in those original pieces (as Paley herself did with her movie Sita Sings the Blues). Old culture doesn't disappear because someone does something new with it -- it gets revitalized.
Holding that back, for some mistaken understanding of "preserving" culture, does seem like a tremendous shame. And so in those situations I think Nina's point is a good one. Creating new artwork should never be something that people apologize for. Historically, building on the works of others is how culture has been expanded. Some of our greatest forms of culture were created exactly that way. Great plays and novels of the past were really re-imaginings of older stories. Musical forms of folk music, rock music, jazz and soul all are versions of building on the works that came before (often very soon before). Hip hop, of course, is even more directly rooted in building on top of the work of others and making something new out of it. Why should people be apologetic for doing what we've always done?
In most areas of entertainment, DRM is an option. If you want to publish an ebook, you don't have to use DRM. Same for video games and music. While these others areas of entertainment are moving away from DRM, there is one prominent holdout on the DRM front: movies. Every official distribution and streaming service for the movie industry has some form of required DRM. This includes streaming services such as Hulu and Netflix, download services like Amazon and iTunes, and even the physical media such as DVD and Blu-ray. According to the larger studios, DRM is a necessity, even though its effectiveness is questionable at best and customers hate it. But what about those studios that want to deliver a High Definition experience without the burden of DRM? What choices do they have? If all they want to do is allow people to stream or download the movie, they have plenty of options, but what if they want to include the full feature list available via Blu-ray?
This is one quandary that Terry Hancock of Free Software Magazine found himself facing a little over a year ago. He had been working on two films and wanted a High Definition feature rich experience without the hassle of Blu-ray DRM. He had looked at multiple options, many of which fell a little flat in the end. However, one stood out as the most reasonable option for what he wanted to do. He had to write his own open, DRM-free, HD video standard.
This may sound like a quixotic goal for a lone individual without corporate backing to develop, but most of the money spent on developing Blu-Ray was spent on the DRM technology -- meaning the technology to make it not play under certain circumstances. The actual business of getting menus and video to work is much simpler, and a lot of the work has already been done. So a format without DRM, based on open standards is intrinsically more attainable.
Think about that. Designing DRM is designing ways in which your movie will not play. Why would anyone want to waste time and money on such an idiotic goal? You would think that movie producers would want people to watch their movies. This idea is what pushed Terry to this point. Why waste time and money on using a DRM'ed media like Blu-ray to release what he wants to be a free culture movie? Even if he tried to work around the DRM of Blu-ray, there is no guarantee that the movies would play in standard Blu-ray players and he would still have to deal with licensing issues.
Terry has not set himself up for disappointment with this standard. He recognizes that it will not unseat Blu-ray as the mass market standard but rather is looking at this for use as a promotional format for those who want to distribute physical media. His examples include using the standard for films as Kickstarter rewards or to distribute films at conventions. There are a lot of opportunities for this to be successful in the indie scene.
On top of this, Terry plans to make the standard completely open and open source. While he does not have an open source web destination yet, he plans to have one ready soon. This choice is probably the key to gaining a more wide spread adoption. If he had tried to keep it locked up in the same way as Blu-ray or DVD, it would never take off.
I applaud the effort Terry is putting into this project. However, it is frustrating that such a project needs to exist. The insistence of the movie studios that all distribution of their films be burdened with DRM is not only ineffective, but it is also harming indie artists who would love to access the features without the restrictions and massive licensing fees. Hopefully, this project will succeed and give those artists the control (or lack of control) they want over their work.
After one or two (or more?) years of being blocked on German Youtube, the full-length noncommercial Sita Sings the Blues movie is once again viewable in Deutschland:
I assume this is because last week I posted this video, complaining about why my 100% legal and painstakingly and expensively licensed movie was blocked in Germany:
Apparently many Germans are none too pleased with GEMA themselves, as indicated by interesting comments here. Some industry shills weighed in as well, but it looks like popular sentiment is against them. The story was shared widely, including in Der Spiegel and the New York Times online editions.
It's not clear how an American YouTube user is supposed to contest takedowns in Germany. When I was in Berlin recently, it was suggested I find a German lawyer to take some sort of action. At the very least, I would need someone in Germany to contest the takedown on my behalf. I imagine that would have been a slow and possibly expensive process. Then I thought of making this video. Although it took some work (writing a statement -- yes I know it's an imperfect statement, I did the best I could with the knowledge I had -- shooting the video, recording the audio via a separate mic, transferring files, editing, compressing, etc.), it was less work than managing an international legal process. And it got results fast! Better still, it contributed to ongoing debates about GEMA and Intellectual Pooperty in general.
My thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about this, and especially people in Germany who checked the Sita Sings the Blues URL and confirmed when the movie was blocked, and when it was unblocked.
Nina Paley, who regularly writes for Techdirt (as well as plenty of other publications) passed along this video she put up about how her movie, Sita Sings the Blues is blocked by YouTube in Germany, thanks to GEMA, the music collection society in Germany.
Since I know a little bit about the ongoing fight between GEMA and YouTube in Germany, I asked Nina if it was okay to do a post, discussing some of the details. We've written about GEMA a few times before, and last year, I went to Berlin and interviewed YouTube's Patrick Walker on stage at PopKomm/All2gethernow, specifically discussing YouTube's ongoing fight with GEMA. The details are a little different than what Nina suggests in the video, though she's absolutely correct that this is very much GEMA's fault. Even though Nina has a paid-in-full license with the various music companies that say displaying/performing her movie for free in Germany is entirely legal, GEMA has taken a ridiculous hardline stance with regards to YouTube. It believes that YouTube needs to pay it ridiculous sums of money for every video on the site that includes any GEMA-licensed music.
Other collection societies around the world have made agreements with YouTube, and worked out reasonable royalty rates for performances. Except GEMA. If I remember correctly, GEMA may be the only major remaining collection society which has not worked out a royalty rate with YouTube, and instead has been fighting a battle in German courts against YouTube. Because of that, and because of some clearly ridiculous court rulings, which suggest that YouTube (rather than its users) are liable for any infringement on the site, YouTube is blocking all videos that it comes across that include GEMA music.
Thus, I believe that the reason Sita Sings the Blues has been taken down is not, as Nina suggests, because of a direct takedown notice by GEMA (though, that's possible), but more likely because of YouTube needing to avoid liability from crazy German court rulings and GEMA's overinflated belief in what a "reasonable" royalty rate would be. Now, notice the key part here: the artist in this case wants the video to be online. Nina is pissed off that it's offline. She's paid quite a bit of money to the various music publishing entities to have the rights to show the movie worldwide, and the one blocking that is GEMA.
This is not an uncommon occurrence in Germany, unfortunately. Because of the way the laws work in Germany, those who have deals with GEMA effectively give up all of their own rights on such things. When I was in Germany, I spoke with multiple artists who were freaking out because they couldn't give away their own music, because GEMA didn't allow it. Aritst would show me their official webpage, without free music, and then their "secret, unofficial" web page with the music they wanted people to download. GEMA, which seems to be run by people entirely out of touch with how music works today, simply insists that no one can give away music for free... because then GEMA doesn't get to collect money. Furthermore, for those who try to get around GEMA and used alternative licenses, GEMA has been known to ignore such licenses, and insist that people still need to abide by GEMA's rules.
This is not a healthy situation. You basically have an out of touch bureaucracy that thinks it gets to set all the rules, even if they don't match the reality in the marketplace. Because of that, artists are suffering. And the fact that YouTube is blocking Sita..., despite it being fully licensed and perfectly legal in Germany, should really wake some people up to the fact that GEMA is not helping artists at all. It's stifling them massively.
