Monthly Archives: March 2010

Steal This Blog

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I am a composer of what we (or at least other composers) tend to call “Concert Music”, that is, music for string quartets and orchestras and choruses and other things where you sit quietly in a darkened hall while shooting dirty looks at the old lady unwrapping a cough drop. I am expensively and elitistly-trained, and work (mostly) by commission. It is pretentious, it is fun, and I do it professionally.
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Note by Noah: This post is by Jonathan Newman, incidentally, who is so shy and retiring he didn’t give his whole name, or his website, which is here.
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Following the thread of posts this week, I’ve noticed more than a little talk about copyright essentially being created for and serving only the Publisher, and not the Creator. But what if that’s the same person? Save one or two works, I am a self-published composer; I run my own “publishing company” (it’s not, really, it’s just me and my Schedule C and a quirky company name), but while serving that function I do all the things a traditional publisher would do, including its main function: to exploit the copyrights it owns. Doing this myself pretty much avoids exactly what Nina Paley describes as the “gate-keepers”…those faceless corporate intellectual copyright owners who keep The Artist down. But I am the Artist (and the Publisher, the two are halves of each other in the case of copyright), and so even though “exploit” isn’t exactly a friendly word, it works fine, because there are in fact multiple ways to make a property (a piece of art) work for the both. Because for me, owning my works, and controlling their distribution through licensing, is how I’m able to survive as a working composer.

Most people don’t realize that when you make a work–and I’ll use music as an example for obvious reasons–your rights concerning the piece are numerous, and on several levels. I’m probably missing one or two, but once your new hypothetical work is completed (Congratulations, writing music is hard) you’re faced with what is actually a constellation of rights, all of which one, or his/her evil representative if s/he’s traditionally-published, can “exploit”:

  • The right to reproduce it (make photocopies, bound copies, whatever)
  • The right to publish and distribute it (these days you should think twice before signing that one away)
  • The right to sync it to motion-picture (this was the prickly one for Nina Paley)
  • The right to “grand” staging (use in a play or ballet or pretty much anything else with costumes)
  • The right to record it (the first time that is, and then anyone can do it as long as they pay the statutory mechanical rates. Thus, covers.)
  • The right to “prepare derivative works” from it (for music that usually means arrange it for other ensembles or instrumentations. For books and whatnot that usually means licensing the rights for the opera, or the movie)
  • The right to broadcast it (radio)
  • and the right to perform it (the biggie)

Now, which one of these would you like me to ignore because you have a yen to use my piece for your own art? My performing rights royalties alone (collected for me by my Performing Rights Agency Of Choice, ASCAP, which also collects any broadcast royalties that might happen) are actually a significant chunk of my income. Does Free Culture want to perform my piece without my collecting that? It might help to know that performing rights royalties are split 50/50 between writer and the publisher. As my own publisher, I receive 100% of them. (Another gate jumped.)

What about when someone likes my recent chorus piece, and wants to arrange it for their brass choir? I should have an open-source attitude, right? Forget the arranging license (and the fee that goes with it) and let it everyone have it, because it’s good for creativity and good for artists?

My point is that any one of these singly isn’t such a big deal, and I’m all for the big picture of helping the Cause of Creativity. But taken as a whole, managing the above list becomes this precious bundle of life-giving manna. If you’re interested in being a composer making a middle-class living that is. Which I am. I don’t teach professionally (only occasionally, usually as a guest artist at a university), so If I give any of these up, all of a sudden, composing music (ie. making Art) is my hobby, and I have to make my living outside of it. And I’ve found that the people most vocal about the benefits of free culture, or maybe most lax in shepherding the above rights, are those who choose to make their living some other way.

When asked in this Roundtable’s centerpiece interview the other day, Nina Paley replied to a question about Free Culture creating “a situation where you can’t have an artistic middle class.”:

What we have now is you can get paid for craft. You don’t get paid for art. You get paid for craft. Every animator that I know, or almost every animator that I know, works at a studio, working on shit. They know it’s shit. They do their best to not think about it, but it’s god-awful commercial shit.

Actually, I get paid for Art. I could have chosen to get paid for craft (being an orchestrator, or a commercial music writer) and decided I was actually better at making Art. And it’s a slog, let me tell you, selling Art. Because Art is, I’m sure you all noticed, incredibly subjective. Only a few out of many like my stuff, and even less love it (shocking, I know). If I expected many to like it, I’d be writing very different music, and would have a lot more wiggle room when it came to giving away my stuff for the sake of Art.

Paley also talked about art not being a profession:

No, I wanted to keep it pure, the love of the craft. When I was quitting Fluff, I said “make art not money, make art not money. Remember that.” And of course I forget periodically and get confused and think that I should be making money and not art. They’re not mutually exclusive, not at all; but you’ve got to remember: don’t do stuff that’s bad for your soul in order to make money.

I realize how mercenary this sounds, but how about making art AND money? Ultimately I’m unclear how copyleft (or free culture in general) can maintain my middle class income. As far as I can tell, the current copyright laws are what do that.

All that being said, I’m actually a fan of Free. I give away content like crazy on my website…mp3 downloads…score of the pieces as PDFs, etc. I give away CDs, even commercial ones, like candy. I give away many (expensive to produce) printed scores. Because I do believe that giving away significant content–not just useless crap, but stuff people can use–in many ways does help create that “fan base” one hears the astute bands and rock stars talk about … those fans that downloaded the album for free, but who later on shell out 300 bucks to go to the tour show and buy the $25 t-shirts. Which right there crystallizes the line for the Free argument. You don’t see “Pay what you want” Radiohead (I’m a fan) letting their devoted following into the show for free. (Or do you? I don’t really know.)

So among this noise, some content is always controlled by the owner. It’s not all free, it’s just a question of what content is deemed not free. For me, it’s the performance materials. That’s the paper (maybe someday it won’t be, I’m looking at you iPads) musicians rehearse and perform from. I rent it, I sell it, I control it. Nothing drives me more bat-shit crazy than seeing other composers give away their stuff. A website full of scores and parts… “Come play my music! I won’t charge! I just want you to play it to Get My Name Out There!” Well, a) I hope you have another job, b) you just made mine a lot harder, and c) the end user (who, sure, now knows your name) thinks your stuff isn’t even worth the paper it’s printed on.

Paley giving away her (beautiful) movie is great and all, but I can’t exactly sell “Jonathan Newman” t-shirts to make up the difference. If all the cool kids started wearing Sita pins and she turned into a pop culture icon, then it hardly matters whether anyone paid to show the film. As much as I’ve tried to make it one, that avenue is not really an option for me.

It’s true, 70 years after death is a silly amount. 50 did seem like enough–2 generations after death (“My Granddaddy made that! You can’t touch it!”)–does seem like enough time to for the family to come up with some more original content, but, as we all know, Disney had other ideas. Still, before these protections, composers did have to scramble. In 1945 Stravinsky famously changed all the half notes to quarter notes in Firebird (not really, but you get the idea) to make a newly copyrightable version for the U.S, so he could prevent the loss of income from performances there. Nothing new under the sun.

I feel Paley’s pain, dealing with copyright owners. Just ask any composer about getting text permission from a publisher for a poem he or she wants to set. Try figuring out who owns the poem in the first place. Or if it’s PD or not. I’ve actually been working on an opera for the last couple of years. The first year of it was just figuring out who actually owned the film my collaborator and I wanted to adapt. I see the problem as not necessarily the rules themselves, but the companies/businesses/corporations who collect the intellectual property and then seem to want to hoard it without licensing it, simply because it doesn’t seem worth it to expend the time/energy/resources/employees to deal. Their mistake is that it is very much worth it. Exploiting the copyright (issuing licenses and collecting the fees), is the entire point of owning the property, whether it’s small or not. When they do that, they are serving the Publisher function. It’s how or whether they’ll do it at all that’s causing problems.

And so, I’m finding the Free Culture argument suspect. If someone wanted to copy my bicycle so that there’s now “one for each of us”, my honest reaction would probably be ‘Fuck you. I spent 3 years making that bicycle. Make your own damn bicycle.’ Not exactly a constructive argument, granted, but let’s at least acknowledge that we’re not talking about a bicycle. Bicycles are not special. They are not (generally) art. Yeeesss, all art is derivative, it’s true. Art is synthesis, and some synthesis is better (brilliant, “original”) than others. But creativity can not be its own reward. We still live in, for better and often worse, a capitalist society, and in no other profession in that society is a lack of compensation expected, like it is with Art. People get paid for charity work, for goodness sakes. At some point, someone, has to charge someone else, something.

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Update by Noah: This is part of a roundtable on copyright issues. You can find the whole roundtable here.

Copyright’s Dubious History

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I’m an attorney with an interest in copyright law. When Noah asked me to participate in this roundtable, I decided to do some research on the history of copyright. I have no background in history.

Why do we have copyright? I figure Wikipedia is probably a decent barometer of common thought. The Wikipedia article on copyright currently has a “justification” section quoting the World Intellectual Property Organization, which states that copyright exists:

“To encourage a dynamic creative culture, while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence, and to provide widespread, affordable access to content for the public.”

Awwwwww. It gives creators dignity, and it somehow makes everything cheaper!

Unfortunately, as it turns out, history presents a more sobering story.

Copyright in Anglo-American law can be traced back to the practices of the Stationers Guild, an organization founded in London, England, in 1403. At the time, all commerce was dominated by trade guilds, each having a monopoly on their respective trades. People could only enter a trade by becoming a guild member, and the only way to become a guild member was to perform a lengthy apprenticeship in a guild affiliated business.

The Stationers were not writers, but were tradesmen who manufactured and sold books. Originally, the guild consisted of booksellers, book binders, text letter writers, and book illustrators. After the creation of the movable type printing press (the first English language book created with the new technology arrived in 1473 or 1474) membership shifted to printers and booksellers.

The printing press helped foster social change, in part by aiding the spread of new religious movements.  The government responded with laws to restrict freedom of speech, starting in 1534, when a new law was passed making it possible to commit treason through writing alone, books needed to be approved, or “licensed”, before publication and the importing of foreign books, which could contain unregulated ideas, was banned[i]

The government’s increasing desire to regulate books provided an opportunity for the Stationers.  In 1557, Queen Mary I, who probably saw a benefit in establishing closer ties between state censor and privacy industry, issued a charter for the Stationers Guild, turning it into the Stationers’ Company. This new charter ensured:

“…only members of the entrenched printing structure would print and sell books, gave them the right of search and seizure of any premises for allegedly pirated or contraband and illegal imported literature, and made fines and imprisonment for three months without trial mandatory for any person whom the company deemed guilty of violation of the law and of their charter.”[ii]

As you might expect, there was a limit to abilities of the authorities, and the monopolists, to stop the pirate book trade.  In 1588, for example, Presbyterian tracts were printed by presses that were moved around the country to avoid detection. Evidently, the consequences of getting caught could be extreme: “A contemporary who’s published handbills criticizing Queen Elizabeth the First had both his arms chopped off…”[iii]

The Stationers Establish A Proto Copyright: for their Benefit Only

Over time, a practice emerged in the Stationers Guild where a member would enter into a registry the first edition of a new work, and the other guild members would recognize that the right to print those books belonged to the registering member alone.

Authors had no legal protections at all.  While the registration system created some incentive for a printer to pay an author for the first physical copy of a book, if a printer obtained an authors manuscript without payment and reproduced it, an author had no legal recourse.

The parallels to certain 20th century media are really startling:

“All property rights in a printed piece belonged to the publisher. The author might receive payment for delivering a manuscript, and an occasional bonus if it sold well, to ensure access to his future writings. A successful book could go into twenty or thirty editions within a few years, but the author received no more than his first piece of coin. … Writers of broadside ballads rarely got more than a few coppers and all the ale they could drink. Rich amateurs were satisfied to see the finished work and have the opportunity to distribute it among their peers.” [iv]

Statutory Protection “for authors”

Eventually, social change caused a snag in the guild’s monopoly. The end of the 17th century brought the “Age of Enlightenment”, and a new Bill of Rights. The House of Commons became fed up with the practices of the Stationers (Evidently, there was concern over the price and quality of books), and refused to renew the law granted them a monopoly over the book trade. This created a problem for the vested interests:

“For five straight years thereafter, the Stationers’ Company unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament for a new licensing act and then regrouped to develop a new strategy: placing authors out in front as the alleged victims and as the necessary beneficiary of protection against their victimization.”[v]

Forming an alliance with notable authors of the day, the Stationers successfully lobbied for a copyright statute.

They got their wish, in more ways than one. Under the new Statute of Anne, passed in 1710, (granting a copyright of 14 years, with 14 year renewal), the business of making books continued much the same. Authors still generally sold their books to printers, for a flat fee, and the printers owned the books until the expiration of the copyright term.  Evidently, authors lacked the ability to effectively bargain with the era’s joint bookseller/ publishers.

It was apparently enough of a problem that, in 1735, a charitable organization, the “Society for the Encouragement of Learning” was formed, dedicated to the mission of publishing books on behalf for authors and giving the profits to authors.

Here’s the really juicy part: in 1738, the Society lobbied for amendments in copyright laws to improve the economic position of authors, proposing a rule which would limit an author’s ability to assign copyright for a term greater than ten years. The Society’s leader, John Caterel, a patron of the arts, stated in 1738 that “the true worth of books and writing is in many cases not found out till a considerable time after publication thereof; and authors who are in necessity may often be tempted to sell and alienate their right which they will hereby have to the original copies of books before the value thereof is known.”[vi]

Ultimately, the amendment was blocked by the House of Lords. As for the Society, the booksellers, protecting their own interests (evidently, many booksellers were also owned printers), refused to carry their books, and the society went out of business in 1748, a failure.

That’s the end of my copyright research.  I’m not going to make any direct parallels between the state of the 1730s book industry and media today.  Today’s market is undoubtedly more complex, and diverse, than the 1730 book trade.  I do think, however, that many of the issues of the time are still relevant to author’s today.  To what extent, I’ll leave as an exercise to the reader.

I mainly relied on the sources listed in the endnotes when writing this article, as well as the article “Law and the Regulation of Communications Technologies: The Printing Press and the Law 1475 – 1641” by David Harvey, available at http://www.anzlhsejournal.auckland.ac.nz/pdfs_2005/Harvey.pdf.

[i] Religious squabbles were something of a national past time in the 1500s, which saw the Catholics fighting the Lutherans, and later the Protestants fighting the Presbyterians.

[ii]Sanjek, Russell American Popular Music and Its Business: The Beginning to 1790.

[iii] Moore, Alan “Going Underground” in Dodgem Logic #1

[iv] Sanjek.

[v] Patry, William Patry on Copyright

[vi] Sanjek.

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Update by Noah: This is part of a roundtable on copyright issues. You can read the entire roundtable here.

Interview with Nina Paley, Part 2

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This is part of a roundtable on copyright and free culture issues. You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

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Previously, Part 1.

So that’s a pretty good segue into talking about Sita. You’d talked about how traumatic it was to realize that the film was illegal. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you found it out, what specifically was wrong, and what it meant to get it decriminalized?

It’s not so much that I realized – I mean, I knew that I was using stuff that I did not have permission to use. But it should have been public domain. I knew that it should have been public domain. I learned that part of it was public domain and part of it was not, and the realization was not so much “oh, I don’t have permission for this.” The realization was the severity of the penalties, and how much more severe the penalties have grown in the last 10 years. Realizing that, wow, I could go to jail for making this film. That was impressive! And it’s all because of these law changes thanks to the industry reacting to the advent of the Internet and really cracking down, and it was like, “wow, I could go to jail.”

If you didn’t pay?

It’s not even if I didn’t pay. There was this dawning realization that getting permission was this Kafkaesque nightmare. Because before that, it was like, oh well, I’ll just pay. They’ll say some amount and I’ll pay. I could not have imagined the difficulty of even talking to them. They wouldn’t even answer my calls. So I think that after a few months of getting the runaround from all of them and not having our calls returned, and being told to call other places and then that went nowhere, while reading about the severity of the punishments, maybe it just took a couple of months, April-May of 2008, when I’d been working on this for a few months and realizing There is No Way Out. They’re not going to talk to me. They don’t have to talk to me. The burden is on me. If their deal is that they only talk to you if you hire a paid intermediary, I have to hire an intermediary to talk to them. I have to do this stuff that I can’t afford to do, and I’d better do it, because if I don’t, I could go to jail [laughs] not to mention being fined zillions of dollars.

So it wasn’t a sudden moment, it was a long gradual slow sinking feeling.

Was it pretty easy to find out at the beginning which pieces were copyrighted and which pieces weren’t?

Well, it was possible to find out. I knew that her voice was not the problem, thanks to the student attorneys at American University.

But someone else did that research; you couldn’t do that on your own.

No, there’s no way I could have done it, but at least they did it for free. And they did all this extensive research on the recordings, and we found that the recordings were not a big problem, and that the underlying compositions were under copyright. I knew that from the beginning, but I could not have imagined that it would be that difficult to clear them. I really thought they’d just name some reasonable number, ‘cause they want money, right? They’ve gotta be – everything I’ve heard about these companies is that they’re interested in money, so clearly they’d set something up so they could get money, right? They wouldn’t ask someone who doesn’t have money to pay $220,000 because there’s no way they’re going to get that! That’s why there’s the whole statutory rate for mechanical licenses. I learned that the statutory rate exists because the record industry lobbied for it, because too many labels wanted their artists to record covers that were the property of other publishers, so it was the record industry that got the statutory licenses for the benefit of the record industry. So the licensors were just crazy; there was no way they were going to get this $220,000 they quoted, and that’s fine with them. It was just this dawning understanding that if no one gets to see my film, that’s fine with them. They don’t have anything to gain from my going forward. It’s not worth the trouble to them, but I could go to jail. I could go to fucking jail.

So as the technology to do things with culture has gotten more democratic they’ve gotten more draconian in almost every way.

Yes. This is like a mafia shakedown. Copyrights were always designed for publishers, not authors – you should read this great essay by Karl Fogel about the history of copyright – but they’re a monopoly for publishers and the argument that publishers used to get this monopoly is “look at this writer. How is this writer going to get money? They’re going to get money by selling us their rights. First we give them a right, and then they sell it to us and then we get a monopoly, yay!”

This is so utterly irrational and unreasonable. It’s something that was supposed to be in the public domain, and if the cultural work is lost, they don’t care. They don’t give a shit about my film, or the songs they “own.” So what I’m supposed to do is kill the film. That’s every message I’m getting: the whole structure is designed for me to kill the film. That is the only possible outcome of this. So then I was like, ok, this is censorship. If the system is designed for me to kill my film, this is censorship. And it was a long struggle, let me tell you. Many tears were shed; I felt so trapped.

You found lawyers who were willing to negotiate this?

I had a sales agent who is a lawyer. I didn’t end up using him in that respect, but his firm – he was trying to get it sold to a distributor and the distributors required that everything was cleared first, and the burden of that fell on me. So initially I used his law firm which was phenomenally expensive and also they did a terrible job. But at least the companies talked to them, because they knew the name. So we got the initial estimates from the companies, and for the mere $10-15K or whatever I ended up paying this law firm, I got to learn that $220,000 was what I would have to pay to clear the rights.

But you didn’t end up paying the $220,000.00; you ended up paying in the range of $50K. What would have been different if you’d paid the $220,000.00?

Then it would be free and clear. Then I would not be required to pay additional money for every 5000 copies sold. I have to make additional payments now, for every 5000 copies sold.

If someone makes a derivative work and they use the songs, can they pay the fees listed on your website, or do they have to negotiate their own?

They have to renegotiate their own licenses. The only thing that my license fees pay for is the cost of a copy, any copy that is sold, a DVD or the iPhone app. If you sell an iPhone app of a movie, you have to pay those fees, which means that the iPhone app is either very expensive or free.

So if someone downloads the film and uses the sound, they’re going to have to call and get their own agreement.

Right, it is a copyleft work that contains copyright stuff. And the copyright stuff will probably be unfree forever, so any reuse of the songs has to be relicensed. You could certainly use all of it without the songs. And some of the modern songs are copyleft now as well; you can make derivative works with all of the soundtrack works except the Rudresh Mahanthappa songs and the Annette Hanshaw songs.

I had one question about Sita itself. The first time I saw the film this dynamic of the whole purity and honor thing really struck me, because I associate that so much with this very politicized aspect of Islamic culture, with honor killings, and that was a real obstacle for me the first time I watched the film, because that such a serious issue for so many Islamic women. I realize this film is not about Islam in any way, but this is a phenomenon that’s been politicized in our culture in relation to Islam. I’m not sure most Americans would realize it’s even an aspect of traditional Hindu culture. You’re obviously critical of it in the film and show it as hurtful, yet I don’t think your film politicizes it. Did you think about that at all when you were making the film, that this issue of a woman’s ‘purity’ being a smear on male honor is a really loaded concept?

I think it’s a problem in all cultures. I just had a conversation with a Hindu friend of mine about Islam, just last night, and I pointed out that our ideas about Islam are not Islam as a whole, they’re a very Arab idea. There’s crap in parts of the Koran just like in parts of Hindu texts, and Christian and Jewish – I don’t know if Buddhists have really horrible things in their texts, although certainly Buddhists can act horrible, like everybody else.

Actually, Ken [Levis], who just walked in here a few minutes ago, made a great documentary called Struggle for the Soul of Islam, and he shot it in Indonesia, which for a very long time has practiced a relatively gentle kind of Islam and only very recently this Arab-style fundamentalist style has come in, and the fundamentalists say that their way is the Real Islam – they say that this really tiny slice of Islam is the Real Islam, and I sometimes wonder if it’s just pure oil money that has created the crisis in today’s Islam, because this Arab style is dominating. They do outreach, they go everywhere and try to convince Muslims all over the world to practice it their way, and that their way is the real way.

Any religion has misogynistic practices, all cultures – ours has evolved from a culture with those practices – so I don’t think they’re unique to Islam. We just know a lot more about them in Islamic countries today.

Right, they’re politicized in Islam in a way that they’re not politicized in other cultures because of political Islam and the way that’s intersecting with the West.

And I can very much believe that they’re more prevalent in Islamic countries right now, which is not to say historically. Obviously, sure, Hinduism has that tradition too, and nobody likes it when you talk about things negative in their cultural history. It’s just all over the world. It’s certainly been a practice by Christians and Jews.

The first time I saw the film it was something I snagged on, especially at that scene where Sita is taken into Mother Earth, which just felt so much like a metaphorization of death and yet it’s presented as a victory for her. The second time I saw it I had gotten more into the spirit of it and just thought “this is so great.” [laughs]

I love that scene. When I do talks, I often don’t want to sit through the whole thing and I come in at that scene –– and it’s just “yes! Go, Sita, run!”

You are giving a lot of talks, now, and spending much of your time being a political activist for copyleft. Do you see yourself being self-consciously political in your art now, or is it going to be two strands?

I’m going to do whatever the muse tells me to do. This past year, definitely these copyright and censorship issues have been on my mind. So it’s natural and essential that I express that. It’s very unlikely that will last forever, because I tend to be passionate about things and then I work them out of my system so I can talk about something else.

I’m always singing your Copying Isn’t Theft song, whistling it in the convenience store and belting it out in the car when I’m at a redlight.

[laughing] Yay!

It’s really catchy, and it’s always popping into my head and reminding me to think about copyleft. And I think with the samples of work I read and looked at from throughout your career, that’s a very Nina Paley thing – that little encapsulation of some point that just really gets at the heart of a point in a way that sticks in your head. Do you really just think like that or do you work at coming up with those things?

I’m terribly forgetful, and every day I will hear or think something that seems so brilliant, and it is a constant source of pain that I can’t remember them, and I guess I do this to remember, but I can only do it for a tiny, tiny fraction of what moves through my consciousness. People say such great things, and I get a headache! I’ve had a headache for four days, because I’ve heard such great things that people have said!

You should carry one of these recorders around.

Yeah, but who has time to listen to all that! Sometimes I’ll write notes, and they go in a notebook and I never look at that again. That’s why I’m thinking about the attention economy: there is more brilliance than I have attention for, and it’s really painful. It’s also my biggest concern as an artist, when I make anything: who is going to look at this? Who has time to look at this anymore? We’re all looking at everything, so who has time to look at anything? And a lot of it is fantastic. I know 98% of it is crap, but there’s so much more of everything, that the 2% of brilliance is growing. Which is why, mostly, I love the idea of the free internet as a wonderful culture filter. I just sit there and wait for someone to recommend something to me, but I don’t have the patience to filter everything myself. That’s how it really works – people recommend things that they like. They don’t recommend things they don’t like, and you have your networks of people that you trust, and they suggest things to you and it all works in a very decentralized, organic way. I have faith that this is increasingly going to be the way we filter our media.

Even when things are recommended to me, I have a very short attention span. So if someone suggests a YouTube video, if I’m not hooked after 45 seconds, I’ll give up. I’ve seen YouTube videos that have made me cry. I saw a great one yesterday; it’s so dumb, it’s so perfect for the Internet. It’s the Cat-certo. It’s a full orchestra, being conducted by a live conductor, beautiful 5-minute long composition, accompanying Nora the Piano-Playing Cat. Nora is just some woman’s cat who goes bang bang bang against the piano. It’s a cute cat video that’s been all over the web and this guy did this beautiful orchestral thing to this video.

I think audiences are taking back their power as the scarcity of works goes away. Most people haven’t realized the power that they hold in their attention. I’ve been thinking about how much people pay for attention, and this idea that people have that the work is a product; the work is the scarce resource, and people will pay for the scarce resource. And it’s so completely backwards, because in the digital age, works are not scarce. They can be copied for almost no money, and the scarce resource is in fact people’s attention. And of course that’s the last thing the media industry wants them to think.

And people don’t acknowledge that. Artists pay a lot of money to get attention, but they don’t talk about it. Most films lose money. It’s like 95% of films lose money at the box office, and I don’t know how much time they give them to make money back on DVDs and merchandise, but most of them make a loss permanently. You’d better be glad there are niche audiences because that’s the most you can hope for!

That right there should make you go, “ok, what is happening?” People are doing these things and they are losing money. I was thinking about my All Creative Work is Derivative Minute Meme, and it was hovering at 8000 views on YouTube. And I thought, “oh, I want more people to see it!” And I wondered if I was going to have to promote it to get more attention. So I was thinking about submitting it to film festivals, and the amount of money it was going to take to submit it. I picked out 20 film festivals and it averaged about $40 a film festival to submit, and also the cost of making the DVD, packaging it, the time spent filling out forms, and postage, and all that sort of stuff, and that’s probably $60 a festival.

If it got into the festival, how many people would likely see it? 100 if I was lucky, and probably more like 45. But let’s be generous and say 100. I am paying $6/person for their attention. And I would totally do that. When I look at the economics of me, that’s not a bad investment; it helps the film a lot.

Speaking of the economics of you, Jaron Lanier asked you [on WNYC’s Soundcheck radio program] about artists being able to make a middle-class living, a consistent and predictable living. It’s a general response to copyleft, that this creates a situation where you can’t have an artistic middle class.

I think it creates a situation where you can have an artistic middle class, which we don’t have right now. What we have now is you can get paid for craft. You don’t get paid for art. You get paid for craft. Every animator that I know, or almost every animator that I know, works at a studio, working on shit. They know it’s shit. They do their best to not think about it, but it’s god-awful commercial shit.

Which is not to say that commercial stuff is bad, I’m not anti-commerce. But it’s devised by some idiot, it’s lowest common denominator, and this is what really talented people do. They do crap work. And it’s not just in animation; it’s at all levels. I can say when I did illustration work, 9 times out of 10 it was for some god-awful piece of shit that paid a lot. That’s not art; that’s craft. You can be paid for your craft. But copyleft actually allows me to make a middle class living as an artist for the first time in my life. It’s not predictable. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but I will say I’ve got more money coming toward me that I ever had before. But the real problem is that copyright proponents don’t like the idea of artists making middle-class livings, because artists are supposed to be fabulous superstars and make millions and millions of dollars. It’s the lottery, the winner-take-all. I think with copyleft you can have a lot more artists doing a lot of good art, making reasonable amounts of money, but this whole fantasy of being the super duper rock star that makes millions and millions of dollars, that is a lot less likely.

It’s the artistic version of people voting against their economic interests because they think they can be Bill Gates.

Yes. Proprietary art is the lottery, and people fantasize about winning the lottery. And with this other system, it’s like, well, if you do this you’re not playing the lottery anymore. You’re not going to win the lottery but you’ll have a much better chance of actually making a living, but no lottery. And they go “Noooo! I wanna be able to win the lottery! And if that means that what I’m actually doing is squandering my talents on somebody else’s piece of shit, then I’ll do that because I wanna be like Madonna someday.”

And by the way, these professional people like Marvel Comics, that’s a product factory. There’s very little of Marvel that I would call art. I’m not saying there’s none.

I have a friend who says one of the things that appeals to him about superhero comics, especially from the ’50s and ’60s is looking for the places where you can see that there was an artist behind that craft factory, looking for that one panel out of 100 where you can see that hand behind the art. That’s what he looks for specifically, and he finds it very humanizing.

That’s really cool. There’s another problem in that copyright is not related to attribution. We don’t actually have laws that protect attribution. You can protect attribution in a copyright contract, when you sign your rights away, you can include things that say you will be credited. But there’s nothing inherent in copyright that says that; that’s up to your contract. So most of these craftsmen, the ones that Jaron Lanier calls artists, they’re not credited. They sold it, and it’s just amazing. We don’t need copy rights; if anything, the big concern for society as well as for individual artists is plagiarism.

With Copying is Not Theft, people conflate copying and plagiarism. Oh, copying is not theft, oh, I’ll just copy this kids’ term paper, and I’ll get an A on it. But no, if you copy it and copy their name with it, that’s copying. If you copy it and put your name on it, that’s fraud! They’re not the same thing!

I just wrote an article called the Limits of Attribution. It’s got pictures; I illustrated it.

When we were going through all the work [on Sita], people kept saying, “you realize copyright protects you?” but it really doesn’t. It doesn’t even protect the people who want the lottery; it protects their fantasy. And also people would say, “Oh, it’s all about money.” But if the corporations wanted money from licensing they would set reasonable prices and they would let ordinary people talk to them. It’s not about money; it’s about control.

Interview with Nina Paley, Part 1

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This is part of a roundtable on copyright and free culture issues. You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

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Nina Paley’s adventures have taken her from Urbana, Illinois across the US and around the world to her current location in New York City, where I had the chance this past weekend to visit and talk with her about cartooning and copyright.

Paley worked as a cartoonist from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, writing comic books and then newspaper strips before switching to animation. If you aren’t familiar with her work, check out her website and blog as well as my recent post about the copyright controversy surrounding her film Sita Sings the Blues. Or search for her cartoons on Archive.org.

I was lucky enough to have a copy of a printed collection from 1987 of her very early work, from high school and college, which she hadn’t seen in years. That’s what we’re looking at during the start of this interview.
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I’m looking at these political cartoons, and they’re really disparate. It looks like someone said “we’ve got this article on this thing; draw something.”

Yes, that’s exactly how the political cartoons in the Daily Illini worked. I was just an illustrator, I was just drawing. I developed my drawing skills long before I developed my voice. So I was happy to illustrate anything.

Did they tell you the position to take in the cartoon? Did you have to agree with what was in the article?

I don’t even think I was paying attention. [Stops and points to a particular cartoon.] God, what an idiot I was! This is such bullshit. I was developing my politics according to people around me, ‘cause I was in college. So I was just sort of – if anyone I knew was outraged about something, I would say “what are you outraged by?” and they’re my friends, so I was like, “that’s outrageous!” Now that I’m a grown-up, I’m thinking, “what the hell?” [laughter] All these — what the hell, these are all opposite to what I think now. Apparently this one was calling for more parking on campus, and I hate cars now, and there’s way too much parking and paving, screw that. And here: “the US isn’t doing enough about terrorism.” But I was so dumb then, “oh, these people are doing bad things to other people and we should do something.”

But you did come from a political family, sort of. Your dad was the mayor of Urbana…

He was the mayor between my ages of 4-8, something like that. It was all very traumatic. Not his being mayor, but the crap I got at school from other students. My thing was, I was drawing very early, and I had my own needs for attention and stuff, and every time I drew something well, the other kids would say “you’re just showing off ‘cause you’re the mayor’s daughter.” And I would be [crying] “That has nothing to do with my art!”

I was going to ask you when you started drawing; so it was really early. You mention (in the intro to the 1987 collection) that you did a couple of comic strips with a history professor at Uni High (University High School in Urbana). Were you cartooning before that?

Not much, I mean, I didn’t get into cartooning. I thought cartooning was not art. I aspired to draw “real art” when I was a kid, when I was below 10, I thought the goal was to draw as realistically as possible and that cartooning was some sort of weird cheating thing, or not cheating but just, it wasn’t the same. But then as I got a little older, got into my early teens, I realized that cartooning was powerful. It had a powerful affect on people that just drawing pretty pictures did not have.

Were you reading things that made you see it that way, or what caused the epiphany?

The epiphany was when I started drawing them and I got all this attention. I gotta be honest about attention. I’m thinking a lot about attention and the attention economy, and I am remembering attention is sort of a dirty word from my childhood, to say “yes, I wanted attention”, you’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say that you have higher motives or something, but wanting attention is really bad. And of course it was always way more than wanting attention, but attention is an essential component of communication, you know? [laughs] There’s expression and then there’s reception, and reception or attention are sort of synonymous in that respect. So when I said things, I wanted to be heard. When I drew things, I wanted them to be seen, and I just found that if I drew cartoons, lots of people were interested in looking at the cartoons, and not so many people with drawing pretty. People would say, “oh, that’s very well drawn,” but cartooning actually had an effect on people; they would actually be engaged.

It’s intimate in a way that fine art is distancing?

I don’t know! I don’t think it has to be. It’s not like the drawings of a 13-year-old explored all the aspects of fine art [laughs] or anything like that. But even when I was into the realistic drawing, I was always interested in mass media art, like books, newspapers, illustrations. And I didn’t even realize – it wasn’t until I was almost 20 that someone distinguished illustration from art. I would make these drawings and someone said “oh, those are illustrations”, and I was “oh, there’s a difference? This is some category of art? I just thought they were art.” But apparently everything I was thinking was art when I was young was actually illustration; I just didn’t know that. I thought it was art.

That was when you were in college? Were you studying art?

I think I was about 19, and it was actually a cousin. A cousin of mine, Debbie, who is a really great artist and designer who now lives in Chicago. [Editor’s note: Debbie’s website is here.] She paints objects, like shoes – I mean she paints on them – shoes and chairs and things like that. She was a designer for a shoe company and they lived in Toronto, and I had drawn these ink drawings of iguanas and showed them to her and asked “What do you think of these? Can I be an artist? I want to be an artist!” and she said “oh, I think you’re an illustrator.” So apparently I must have been fascinated and influenced by books, comics, newspapers. Scholastic books, those books you order in school and they come like Christmas every month? They had all these great things that you can’t find online because they’re under copyright and whomever owned them would never release them that way.

I remember I had a book called Captain Ecology, a cartoon by Tom Eaton. There’s another cartoonist named Tom Eaton but this is a different one. It was a comic strip book thing and I liked the drawings. And there was Escaped from the Zoo in the Daily Illini; this would have been in the early 80s.

I always drew, everybody drew when we were young. Other people stopped drawing and I didn’t. It’s really true, everybody drew.

When did they stop?

I don’t know because I wasn’t paying attention! It was just like I looked up [laugh] and “what happened to everyone? When did this start?” I don’t know what age people start really getting into shame, like feeling ashamed of themselves.

[flipping through book] PLATO! (Editor’s note: PLATO was the first computerized instruction system, built around 1960 by the University of Illinois and used by the university and local schools.)

There are lots of computers, and engineering stories and space stories in this early work. Was that the influence of the people who were writing for you?

That was my group. My father’s a mathematician, and my brother was studying math and computer science; I went to Uni High after my hellish three years at Urbana Junior High. I used the PLATO computers all the time. I was an early computer addict before most people had that opportunity; those were my friends, that was my life. When I was in college, I met other people, but I didn’t befriend other people. I always thought that the cooler people were the engineers and stuff, I did study art and I dropped out after 2 years. socially going into the art department: it was like a wasteland.

So the transition to doing Flash animation on the Mac was very natural.

Yes! Definitely.

It sounds like you were very interested in expression, in getting your drawings out.

Initially, I was just interested in developing my skills. I didn’t really learn how to really speak with my own voice until I was 20 and moved to Santa Cruz and started doing Nina’s Adventures in Santa Cruz. Up until that point, I was just interested in illustration and illustrating other people’s ideas. It just didn’t occur to me that I had that kind of voice. And I just wanted to draw. I think I was aware of the power of drawing; I didn’t know how to use it but I liked it. I was developing it. I couldn’t imagine writing my own comic strip.

And I look back on it, and I had no self-esteem, so I was continually anxious about doing this comic strip that was written by someone who wasn’t a student, (Joyride, originally written by David Gehrig), because there were these really explicit rules: Student Work Only in the paper. So I had to keep it a terrible secret that I was using an outside writer – David is writing it and he’s not a student! I gotta write this myself, ‘cause I can’t have that!

You mention (also in the introduction to the 1987 volume) that you thought you weren’t a writer. How did you figure out that you could write them yourself? At some point you must have come to terms with yourself as a writer; can you tell a little bit about how you got there?

I just started! [laughs] OK, that’s not entirely true.

When I was 17–18, I started writing a journal. I was doing a lot of very necessary self-searching because I was depressed. I was quite out about being very depressed as a kid, and basically depressive as an adult also although I take medication; I’ve been taking medication for 20 years.

And it works?

Yeah, fuck yeah. Which is not to say that I don’t still have episodes, but they’re spaced much farther apart. Devastating when they happen, but at least it’s not every day all the time. So, I was desperate, because that kind of mental illness, the older you get the worse it gets. So I was desperate for anything to help myself, and at some point I started writing this journal, this illustrated journal-y thing, where I was writing about real things that were actually going on. Things that I was feeling terrible about, and things that I was ashamed of, I would actually write them. I got better and better at looking at the hidden part of myself, and getting them out.

…externalizing them through both writing and pictures.

Yes.

Were those experiences of writing and drawing similar for you?

I wrote and drew.

Just seamless.

Yes. I wrote and drew pictures [laugh] of the inside of my head, punching people, killing myself, all those things. And they were funny, man, they were really funny. So I’d be writing these things and laughing.

And I saw shortly before I left Urbana, I saw Life in Hell for the first time, the Matt Groening books and I saw Lynda Barry’s older books. I mean, obviously they had to be older books because – that is what is now her early works. And both of them were actually doing comics about real things. They weren’t just doing fluff entertainment. They were doing psycho comics, and they were just so real. They were brilliant, and those were the first things, the first time I ever realized, oh wow, you can really discuss real stuff and deep stuff and profound stuff in comics, and be funny. So they showed me it was possible, and then I moved to Santa Cruz, when I was 20, which was a whole other world of trauma that I wasn’t prepared for.

Were you going to school?

Nope, I wanted to be a new-age crystal-wielding hippie. My friends in Urbana were hippies. In Urbana, the smart non-conformist people were hippies. And so I went to Santa Cruz, young and naïve, and was like, “oh, it’s all full of hippies; these are my people.” And I actually lived there, and then it was “no wait, in Santa Cruz, the dumb conformists are hippies and the smart non-conformists are something else.” [laugh]

So there I was – increasingly disillusioned, young, dumb, mentally ill, [laugh] and I’d just moved away from home, and I guess that was enough stress that it finally found an outlet with my Nina’s Adventures strips, which were taken from my journals, and so it began. Thus began my real life as an artist.

I was in Santa Cruz for 3 years, and then in 1991 I moved to Austin, Texas for 3 months, and it didn’t work out [laughter]. I had one hell of a depressive episode there. I kept moving away from anyone I had contact with. I didn’t realize that I actually had connections with people. I think that was a real problem with being depressed. There were people in my life but I felt like I was all alone, and nobody loved me and like that, so I thought I had nothing to lose, but you move away from it and it’s like, “oh wait, wait a minute, I did have friends, and [laugh] I’m calling them all long-distance now!”

Back before there was cheap long distance included with your cell phone.

Exactly. So then I moved to San Francisco because when I lived in Santa Cruz I’d met people who lived in San Francisco and I thought, “I’m just gonna try to live in a real city.” I was scared of real cities. I always wanted to live in college towns like Urbana. So I thought I’ll just try living in this horrible big city, and of course I took to the city like a duck to water and realized I always should have – I’m very well suited to cities.

So while we’re on the subject of how you became a cartoonist, I wanted to ask you about comments I’ve heard more than once from women who are interested in comics that they feel like cartooning is not an available profession for a woman, that they thought it was very hard to be a woman cartoonist. Did you have any particularly gendered experiences?

Cartooning is not a fucking profession. I certainly did have gendered experiences, but I do want to just say that this whole approach to cartooning and art like it’s a profession, as though it’s people with jobs, and “they’re not recruiting women, the cartoon jobs aren’t recruiting women at the job fair.” It doesn’t work like that. But yes, I had extremely gendered experiences in my youth. And I am happy to say that the last time I went to a comics event which was the Alternative Press Expo here in New York (put on by the Museum of Cartoon and Comic Art), there are so many more women doing alt comics. It was not like that at all in the early ‘90s. It was horrible in alternative comics, just horrid.

It’s not just that I was female: I had a lot of other “social handicaps.” Being a woman was a social handicap. I was so bitter, so fucking angry. And, for good reason, being angry did not help my career, and in fact, I did the right thing, which was just to get out of it, stop pounding on that particular door.

Is the reason you left comics tied to this frustrating set of experiences?

Well, I got into newspaper comics. Newspapers were much more friendly to me than alternative comics. It was a cultural thing. Alternative comics were newer, smaller, very male dominated, and for whatever reason, things happened because of socializing. Now, I’m pretty sure that with my other social handicaps – my other social handicaps are that I don’t drink, I don’t take drugs, I don’t smoke, I don’t like bars. They were all really into all of those things, so people would go to parties and drink and that’s where everything happened. So it wasn’t just that I was a woman. However, I am certain that had I not been a woman, and had everything else about me been the same, I would have gotten much further. It was also this whole thing where — the alternatives grew out of the underground comics, and there were a lot of underground comics that were overtly misogynistic. And the few women cartoonists would say, “this is misogynistic; we don’t like this” and then the response to that, and this is strange, is that people would respond to that as though they were being censored, not criticized. So they were just not able to process that this would criticism. They would immediately get into this anti-censorship stuff. Maybe that’s related to stuff in Canada, because Canada was and still is censoring anything that could be considered porn, which includes a lot of comics. So the threat of censorship in Canada was very real.

I think that might be giving them too much credit.

I’m trying! But you know I wasn’t out to censor anybody – a, how could we and b, why would we want to. We were criticizing it and then suddenly we were accused of being a censor, and they were not into that. I did notice that the few women who were relatively successful underground cartoonists were either married or having sex with successful men cartoonists. So I did sort of go, hmm. Now, I’m not going to name any of them, but that was the case. And there would be depressed or even autistic male underground cartoonists and they would be fine. They didn’t have to go to the bars and do all this stuff. They didn’t have to sleep with the other cartoonists [laugh]. They didn’t have to be cute and bouncy; they were fine. But if you were a woman and you were like that, that was nowhere. And to be honest…I don’t know. I don’t really fucking know. I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad I got out of it, and I’m really glad that when I went last, there were lots of women there and these issues seemed to be just infinitely smaller now.

But it was still happening when you got out?

Oh yeah, it was a nightmare, still, when I stopped going to any comic conventions in the mid-1990s. I remember the last gig, I don’t remember what year my last Diego con was, but I was just like, I can’t ever do this again. [laugh] This is self-abuse. I guess it was shortly before I started doing Fluff. I reached a point where, “ok, I’m not going to do comics. Newspaper comics are different from comic book comics. They have nothing in common, and I am pursuing the newspapers.” That was probably 1995; I don’t remember when I started Fluff.

So I did this syndicated strip at the Universal Press – thank you Universal Press for the glorious opportunity, which I am eternally grateful for – but I did burn out. It just wasn’t fun at all anymore.

Was it the routine deadlines and the need for consistency?

Yes, the routine deadlines and the need for consistency, and also just the volume of it, every damn day. I guess that’s the consistency. The same format every single day, and so I only had this vague memory of when art was fun, and I was like “how did this happen; how did I get here?” I was just thinking I gotta have fun again.

Do you think it affected the quality of you work near the end of the strip, or was it just that it wasn’t meaningful to you at that point?

No, I’m competent. I’m always competent. By the end though, I couldn’t bear to write it, so thank god, I got my friend Ian Akin to write it, so you’ll see at the end the later Fluff’s say “Akin/Paley” or “Paley/Akin”; he did a really good job.

That makes sense though with the way you were saying: you built your chops as an artist so the drawing was always fine.

Yeah, I call that craft, now. I can do the craft, although I can’t do that stuff anymore. My soul just rebels. And obviously I couldn’t really keep doing it then ‘cause I quit. But the quality didn’t suffer. I remembered the joy I felt when I was 13 and making Super8 animation, and I had also just started dating “Dave” (Editor’s Note: Dave is the character name she uses for her ex-husband in Sita Sings the Blues), who was a professional animator, and he had an animation table, which I’d never used before.

I did Super8 animation when I was a kid in Central Illinois with no real support. There were no animators there. If there were any, they weren’t going to help a 13-year-old girl, so I had books, and that’s it. But I never had any equipment for it. An animation table is like a light box, and there’s paper with pegs, and he had this animation table, and I was “wow, I wanna do this again,” so I did. I also borrowed a friend’s Super8 camera and just picked up where I left off when I was 13 or 14 – and sure enough it was fun. My joke is that I found something that took more work and paid less than comics. That’s what I needed to have fun.

Did you work as an animator, or was this something you just did for love?

No, I wanted to keep it pure, the love of the craft. When I was quitting Fluff, I said “make art not money, make art not money. Remember that.” And of course I forget periodically and get confused and think that I should be making money and not art. They’re not mutually exclusive, not at all; but you’ve got to remember: don’t do stuff that’s bad for your soul in order to make money.

One of the things that people do leverage against copyleft is that you don’t get the quality you get with traditional methods.

You just get more of everything: you get more crap and more quality. I’m also really excited about more voices getting to be heard. What’s so different for me now is that my work can reach an audience, and it was so frustrating in the age of gatekeepers. I am so fucking sick of gatekeepers, who just defined everything that happened to my art for so long.

Out of completely cost benefit analysis motivations?

No, no, it was just their own taste. These are human beings, they are extremely fallible. A lot of them are really fucked up people, and they have these jobs where they’re supposed to make decisions about what their audience wants, and they’re frequently wrong. Even really smart really nice people in those jobs are frequently wrong. Those are not jobs anyone should have.

It should be collective.

Right, let people see it and let people decide whether they like something. I’m freeing all of my old strips under copyleft licenses [Editor’s note: many are already available on archive.org; hyperlinked names of comics in this article point to the archive.org page where you can download them.] And I would so love a publisher to publish a book of them, or some of them – anything they want. And the fact is any publisher could do that. But whomever does it first will have the competitive advantage. People tend to buy copies that are available and accessible rather than putting together their own. I have a volunteer effort to put all my old strips on WordPress blogs so that all of them are accessible. I have an enormous amount of this stuff. I was really hoping it would be up and running sooner than it has been because I’m trying to set an example and I’m trying to get my work seen again. I’ve got all these great old comics, and my work is obscure. All my newspaper strips are on archive.org. They’re apparently not accessible enough for them to be easily shareable; they’re still too difficult to find, even though they’re free. I want people to build on them.

The only publishers doing open-licensed works are tech publishers. Pop culture publishers – it is anathema to them. And the tech publishers don’t do pop culture. I actually asked O’Reilly, but physically a lot of work needs to be done. I’ve done the work of making the comics and I’ve done some work to make them accessible, and if a publisher could put it together, then people could see it online and say “is there a book of this?” And then buy that publisher’s books!

So you can have niche audiences, which scares people. It’s true when you have lots of niche audiences it’s a lot harder to control the masses, because if you just have limited information from just a few centralized points of distribution, it’s much easier to control everyone and we’re getting a situation where all kinds of niches can get the kind of culture that they want and people are saying things like, oh, and this means they’re not going to be exposed to things that they don’t like and that’s terrible, and look, these people with politics that we abhor are forming their own little communities and saying these things that we don’t like to each other, and yeah, I don’t like it either. I realize that there will be little communities of people that say terrible things that I would never want to hear, and I don’t have to. But there’s so much fantastic art that never would have made it through a gatekeeper system.

The more gatekeeping there is, the more culture is funneled. It just gets funneled more and more and more. I understand the point that not having gatekeepers means you get a lot of niche audiences, but it seems like if you don’t have niche audiences you have niche culture.

Yes! One culture fits all – but it sure didn’t fit me, and mine didn’t fit it. Didn’t fit that niche, and so the gatekeepers were like, “No. I don’t think this is the lowest common denominator and we’re only looking for the lowest common denominator.” And mine wasn’t that. So if it’s out there, the right audience finds my stuff, and there’s plenty of people that appreciate my stuff.

Read Part 2.Sita-Still-2

Cuckoo for Copyright: Sita Sings for Your Entertainment

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This is part of a roundtable on copyright and free culture issues. You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.
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Caro discussed the copyright issues involved in Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues in a post a couple of weeks ago. I’ll quote her summary of the film and it’s relation to copyright issues:

Around the same time that Lethem’s article was hitting the newsstands, cartoonist Nina Paley was hitting a brick wall in the production and distribution of her blues-inflected animated full-length feature film, Sita Sings the Blues. Made by Paley single-handedly in her Manhattan apartment, Sita brings together an embarrassment of source-material richness: Paley’s own humor-filled story of breakup-by-email, the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, and the blues songs of ‘20s American songstress Annette Hanshaw.

Despite the “open source” culture of indigenous blues, it’s those Hanshaw recordings that led her to the brick wall: the recordings’ are restricted by copyrights held by large corporations like Sony and EMI. The cost of licensing the music used in Sita would have cost her more than it cost to make the entire film…

Paley’s imaginative solution to the problem has been to give the film away for free, and the result has been a firestorm of enthusiasm for all things Sita. Paley says that her new “free culture” lifestyle has eradicated her cynicism and made her even more creative than before.

I saw Sita earlier this week, and it’s well-constructed and lovely to watch. Cutting back and forth and in and out between styles and stories, Paley’s visual inventiveness is impressive. I particularly liked the scenes of bloodshed and carnage, invariably done in a slick, cartoony animation style, with Rakhasa demons whimsically disintegrating into piled-up bloodily gushing bits as Rama’s wife Sita trills along in Annette Henshaw’s gosh-gee flapper vocals. I love Paley’s housecats too; drawn in a simple, line-art style with paws that open and close like hands, they trot across the screen with adorable insouciance.

Despite the movies pleasures, though, I had some reservations. Maybe those are best expressed by
this comment from Vikas over at Roger Ebert’s blog.

I”m intrigued by the take this woman has on the story of Rama and the Ramayan.
The story is actually, 98% of the time, told regarding the main part of the Ramayana story which is about Ram who is a an incarnation of God – of brahma, the spirit, of Christ, of Krishna, or who you will — he is God, he embodies God.

His role on earth is to demonstrate dharam – duty, and how to live one’s life. He is a good husband, he loves his wife, he is humble, he turns the other cheek against those who offend him, and wins hearts with love, humility, and peace. When his hand is forced, he fights for what is right.

This is the actual story of Ram the prince, and it is a very beloved tale by all Indians. There have been countless adaptions of it. It is very important to know this aspect of the story, though this animated tale seems to concentrate on a part of the tale that is actually not considered a large part of the Ramayana epic itself, and in fact is often considered a part of the epic that comes in a “sequel” if you will.

at any rate, the epic, as we recall, is about Ram (who embodies God), and later then suspects his wife of adultery. This is meant to be God himself, demonstrating the frailty of human beings, when they lack faith in the divine, when they disrespect the feminine aspect of God. In the epic, Ram himself knowingly, in consciousness, acts out this betrayal of the feminine, as a lesson to humanity, then is punished for it.

I thought these aspects of the tale are important to consider; the epic is not just about some evil husband who betrays his wife. The main Ramayana is not this story; but this tale of doubting his wife is toward the end of the epic, after many countless tales and lessons and acts of valour, heroism, and love by Ram for his wife Sita.
This woman, who has made this enchanted film, seems to have concentrated on the betrayal aspect (is she a feminist? is she bitter???? Her choice seems to betray an extreme vision of the epic, and does not take into account the metaphor and the knowledge by Indians that Ram was God-consciousness manifested on earth, AS WAS Sita, both to enact the frailties of human beings and the cost of disrespect to the feminine divine, in the final, last act of the Ramayana.)

I just see it as unfortunate that an animated fable such as this casts Ram as a villain, and suspect it has to do with the maker’s own somewhat imbalanced view of the epic as a whole.
Vikas

Parts of Vikas’ comments here seem irritating and wrong-headed (I mean, of course Paley’s a feminist! And what’s wrong with being bitter, anyway?) But I think there’s something to his overall point. The Ramayana is a religious epic central to India’s culture. Paley takes it and essentially presents it as a metaphor for her own relationship troubles. She uses Henshaw’s recordings in a similar way; the songs are taken out of context, so that they’re no longer about Henshaw, but rather about Sita, and through her about Paley. The movie is an engine for turning culture into Paley; Ramayana and 20s jazz are there to reflect Paley back to herself so she can be comforted and heal.

So…what’s wrong with that? After all, nobody owns the Ramayana — and nobody owns Henshaw either, even if her recordings are copyrighted. Why not take from culture what you want, apply it to yourself, and turn it to your own ends? Another of Ebert’s commenters, Sumana Harihareswara makes essentially this point:

To vikas’s comment, and those of others who fear that this film doesn’t respect the epic: I’m an Indian and I love this movie. If you watch the trailer you’ll see that throughout the entire thing you’ll hear Indians commenting on characters, motives, and the versions of the story they heard growing up. A list of collaborators, including many Indians.
http://www.sitasingstheblues.com/collaborators.html

It’s an epic, a classic. No one gets to say “This is the One True Ramayana and any retelling that focuses on a part I don’t care for is Wrong.” And that goes for Beowulf, the Iliad, and all those spinoffs of Austen and Eyre.
If you watch the film, you’ll see that it is indeed a tale of love, romance, exile, reunion, and then the episode you consider an optional sequel at the end. But if the Ramayana is a tale of hard ethical choices, then the ugly episode fits right in. Dasharatha must choose between his promise to his heir and his promise to his wife. Sita chooses between chastity and giving in to her kidnapper’s demands. And Rama chooses between his credibility as a king and his loyalty to his faithful wife.

You could see it as a testament to the epic’s continuing power, after all, that a woman from a different culture and a different era can still see herself in it. Culture is there to be used. It lives when we transform it. Right?

That’s the theory of the free culture movement that Paley promotes, in any case. And I’m fairly sympathetic. Having giant corporate conglomerates sitting on Henshaw’s recordings doesn’t benefit anyone but giant corporate conglomerates…and surely they have enough going for them as it is. And if nobody should own Henshaw, then surely, as Harihareswara says, nobody can own the Ramayana, any more than anyone can own the Bible. These texts are part of humanity’s cultural heritage; they’re riches we all share.

But…are they riches, and do we really share them? The free culture movement t presents itself often as an alternative to capitalism; a way to get culture out from corporate dominance and let it return to its free, natural state. The thing is, though, that “free” is still a price point — culture is still treated as part of the marketplace, albeit as a free sample rather than as a commodity per se. The happy jouissance of sharing and bricolage, or reinterpretation and personal healing, matters more than the original context of the Ramayana, or of anything. The freedom of culture becomes more important than culture itself — which seems to me like a classic formulation of humanistic capitalist ethics.

The fact that capitalist art is capitalist isn’t particularly shocking, or even condemnatory. And Sita and other manifestations of free culture (like, say, mashups) are fun. Irreverently taking bits from here and pieces from there and tossing them all together, regardless of context — it’s startling and exhilarating.

The downside is that it’s also glib. The 560th mashup of “Single Ladies” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” starts to feel less like high-spirited transgression than like a lack of imagination. You get that sense of lurking pedestrianism while watching Sita as well. Paley goes to India — so, hey, her love life is just like Sita’s! And Annette Henshaw singing “Mean to Me” is just like when Rama is mean to his wife! It’s amazing how those go together! By the end of the movie, the whimsical cuteness with which the Henshaw songs commented on the action had moved past entertaining and on into actively irritating. Indeed, the insistent preciousness of the film eventually becomes grating, from the oh-aren’t-they-ethnic modern-day Indians who provide adorably confused commentary to the Sita stories, to the animated Sita’s winkingly gyrating Betty Boop hips.

Watching Sita in this context, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the free culture movement isn’t so much a repudiation of modernity as it is an extension and perfection of it. We’re all consumers, we all want everything as cheap as possible — and there’s nothing cheaper than free. With culture liberated, we can all flit from distraction to distraction, stopping just long enough for a single sip before rushing off to the next taste sensation. In capitalism, we’re all tourists and all local color, performing cheerful parodies of our ancestor’s native dances for the elucidation and healing of our pathologically rootless neighbors.

Cuckoo for Copyright: Read This And I Own Your Brain

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This week on HU we’re going to have a roundtable discussion on issues around copyright and free culture. The roundtable will be anchored by an interview with artist and free culture advocate Nina Paley, conducted by Caro, which will be posted in a few days. We’re also going to have a guest post by Pallas, a sometimes HU commenter who has studied intellectual property law. Finally, we’ll have a guest post by Jonathan Newman, a contemporary classical composer and a bit of a free culture skeptic.

To start things off, I thought I’d reprint one of the first things I wrote for The Comics Journal way back when. This was reprinted by the good folks at Poor Mojo’s Almanac a while back, but hasn’t appeared on this blog before. Thanks to Alan Benard of Poor Mojo’s for putting in all the useful links, for updating them, and for figuring out how to allow me to reproduce them despite my tragic lack of tech savvy. (And Alan himself may appear here later in the week with links to some of his favorite mashups.)
______________________________

READ THIS AND I OWN YOUR BRAIN

This article [except for some very minor alterations] first appeared in The Comics Journal #268. The rights have now reverted to me (that’s Noah Berlatsky, the author), and so I’m releasing it to Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k) (and to anyone else who would like to reprint it) under the Creative Commons license Attribution-Sharealike 1.0. Basically this means that you can reprint the article for free, without permission, as long as you (1) credit me, and (2) make it clear that others are free to copy it under the same conditions. So, as I understand it, including this note should cover you. For more information on this Creative Commons license, see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/

Laws mainly benefit those who can afford lawyers, and intellectual property laws are no exception. If you’re a huge media conglomerate, copyright restrictions can transform you from a humble peddler of ephemera into an intergenerational dealer in cultural crack. The public wants their lovable icons — the public needs their lovable icons — and, as the only source, you can turn that rascally rabbit into a jagged, futuristic obscenity, sneer at your customers, and still walk away with a tidy profit.

ARTISTS VS. ART

This view of intellectual property has been heavily promoted by those media conglomerates mentioned above, all of whom want you to feel that, say, illicitly downloading the latest Destiny’s Child hit single is the moral equivalent of stealing an aged relative’s food stamps. Never mind that most musicians don’t get a dime from their record sales 1. Forget that artists from Jack Kirby to Billie Holiday have been systematically screwed despite (or often because of) copyright law. The ideal remains in the mind of the public, the legislature, and the judiciary: copyright laws are designed to protect artists from exploitation.

But they aren’t. The U.S. Constitution clearly states that intellectual property laws are designed “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.” In other words, rights are granted specifically to promote art, not artists. Copyright law assumes that artists won’t spew forth innovation without economic incentives. To give them those incentives, we grant them exclusive rights to their products. In the 1994 case of Fogerty v. Fantasy Inc., the Supreme Court reiterated this point, explaining that “The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ëauthor’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good. 2”

Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that since the post-Enlightenment apotheosis of capitalism and the printing press, the profit motive has become an important motivation for many artists. Trollope, for example, self-confessedly wrote to make money first and foremost. If copyright were eliminated entirely and he couldn’t gain a middle-class income through writing, he might well not have bothered. The same might be said of Dickens, Stephen King, and a whole host of others — or as Harlan Ellison put it in Following Cerebus #3, “What we’re looking at is the egregious inevitability of no one but amateurs getting their work exposed, while those who produce the bulk of all professional-level art find they cannot make a decent living.”

Of course, Ellison is seriously overhyping his vision of aesthetic apocalypse, and downplaying some even more important dangers. While creators can be threatened in certain situations by a lack of money, they are certainly and always threatened by a lack of access to the work of other creators. Art is built out of other art 3. Shakespeare stole most of his plots from other sources. One of Rachmaninoff’s most famous compositions is based on an idea taken from Paganini. The novelist Henry Fielding wrote not one but two novels — Shamela and Joseph Andrews — using characters lifted from Samuel Richardson’s extremely popular Pamela. Raphael, Da Vinci, and all the other old masters used images suggested by the Bible. Walt Disney used public domain folk tales for many of his classic movies. Many of Harvey Kurtzman’s greatest efforts were close parodies of the works of other cartoonists 4. And on and on. It’s hard to think of a single piece of art that isn’t inspired by, responding to, or ripping off another piece of art.

All in all, therefore, the original copyright law, passed in 1790, was a very canny compromise between the artists’ need for a financial return and his need for access to other art. According to this act, creators had to register their work with the government, making it easy to tell which works were copyrighted and which were not. Once registered, the copyright term ran 14 years. During that period, the artist had monopoly rights to publish, distribute, and/or license the work as he saw fit. At the end of that time, if the creator was still around and thought there was still money to be made from the work, he could register for a 14-year extension. And that was it. A maximum of 28 years, and then your work went into the public domain — which is to say, it could be used freely by all. In other words, if this law were still in effect, not only Superman, but Daffy Duck, Spider-Man, the Grinch, and Snoopy would be available for many purposes, free of charge, to any artists who felt like using them 5.

ARTISTS VS. THEIR GRANDCHILDREN

Now, public domain characters and works can still generate income. Publishers continue to reprint the works of Mark Twain and Winsor McCay, for example, and people continue to buy them. Nonetheless, no media mogul can build his fortunes on licensing Mark Twain properties for film adaptations, because anyone can make a Huckleberry Finn movie for free. Nor are Little Nemo T-shirts, pajamas, and lunch boxes likely to make anyone filthy rich, because if they caught on, every schmuck with a scanner could start churning them out. Multimedia assaults don’t work unless you hold exclusive, monopoly rights to a story or character.

Big media, then, has a vested interest in extending the reach of copyright — and since big media also has a great deal of money, it should come as no surprise that copyright protection has, in fact, been enormously expanded. Thus, today, you don’t need to register your work with the government; in fact, you don’t need to do anything to copyright your work — even that little "©" is unnecessary 6.

In addition, Congress has repeatedly extended the term of protection for new works, and they have generally made these extensions retroactive, applying them to works already created. Thus, if you wrote a poem in 1977, your copyright would last for 56 years. Then, in 1978, Congress changed the law; suddenly, your copyright was guaranteed until your death, plus 50 years. According to the theory of copyright in the Constitution, this is pointless, of course. Copyright is meant to be an incentive, but if you’ve already written your poem, you’ve already written your poem — more encouragement, in the form of more copyright, might theoretically get you to write another, but no one can argue that it’s going to make you write the first one over again.

However, Congresspeople aren’t elected to promote progress, or even logic — they’re elected to kowtow to special interests. This goal, at least, they pursue with unwavering dedication and skill, as they demonstrated once again in 1998 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act [.pdf]. Named for a notoriously derivative songwriter-cum-legislator and backed by all the might of Disney, Inc., this bill extended the term of pre-1978 copyrights by another 20 years. Thus Mickey Mouse, due to go into the public domain in 2004, will continue to bolster the sagging Disney brand for another generation. Almost as an afterthought, post-1978 copyrights were also extended by 20 years. A new work created today will be under copyright for the life of the creator plus 70 years 7.

One interesting thing about the Sonny Bono Act is that, in their haste to propitiate their corporate overlords, Congress has abandoned not only the goal of promoting art, but also the goal of helping the artist. Copyright now extends long after the creator is dead. Indeed, in most cases, the creator’s spouse and even the creator’s children will have expired long before the copyright does. With the Sony Bono act, then, authors can dream, not merely of fame and riches in their own lifetime, but of grandchildren and even great-grandchildren growing ever more bloated and idle as they suck, leech-like, on the corpse of their ancestor. And if an author happens to be sterile, or single, or just hates his kids, at least he can comfort himself with the thought that a giant marketing nexus will tramp forward into the next century bearing his mark.

Of course, many may covet but few will ever actually attain this level of dynastic bliss. For the rest of us, the extension of copyright ensures, not greater wealth, but more certain obscurity. Take me, for example. I’m a very minor league critic and zinester. Yet, if I live an average lifespan, this article will not be in the public domain until sometime in the 2130s. Needless to say, by that point, there is a fair chance that my reputation, The Comics Journal, and even Fantagraphics [the publisher of The Comics Journal] will all have ceased to exist.

Imagine now that, for whatever reason, some academic stumbles across a copy of this issue in some library archive in 2105, and wants to reprint my article. She will of course need to secure the rights. Remember that copyright is no longer linked to year of publication — so to determine if the article is out of copyright, our academic will need to find the date of death of some anonymous reviewer in a tiny, defunct, decades-old magazine. If she’s particularly savvy and interested, and has time and money, perhaps she’ll ask the copyright office to run a search — which may or may not be definitive, since, as mentioned above, copyrights no longer need to be registered. Alternately, she may just reprint the piece, hoping that nobody will bother to sue her. But there’s also a fairly decent chance that she’ll just say “fuck it” and forget the whole thing. This is too bad for her, obviously, but it’s also too bad for me, and for anyone who writes with the desire to have their work read by as wide an audience as possible. [Licensing this article under the Creative Commons license is meant to address some of these issues, at least as far as this particular article is concerned.]

Works whose creators can’t be found are sometimes known as “orphaned works.” As copyright is extended, orphaned works by obscure or unfindable authors become more and more common. Already, films and comics from the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s are deteriorating beyond recovery because no one knows who has the right to restore and reprint them. This isn’t intentional — it’s a kind of accidental, bonus censorship. Indeed, it’s so clearly pointless that Capitol Hill — prodded by public-domain advocate Lawrence Lessig — has actually shown some vague interest in fixing it 8.

But the extension of copyright contributes to more straightforward censorship as well. First, copyright holders may try to stamp out works that they don’t own, if they feel that those works are derivative. This often occurs even — or rather, especially — if the derivative work is of higher quality than the original, as was arguably the case, for instance, with the original Captain Marvel.
Second, copyright holders often try to suppress controversial works to which they themselves own the rights. Thus the James Joyce estate has long worked to suppress Joyce’s racy letters to his common-law wife, Nora Barnacle.

FAIR USE VS. GOBS OF MONEY

The problems discussed above are supposed to be mitigated in part by a principle called “fair use.” According to fair use, a small portion of a work may be reprinted for educational or critical purposes, without getting the permission of the copyright holder. “Fair use” also allows artists to create parodies based closely on a copyrighted work 9.

Fair use is absolutely vital for the open discussion of ideas; without it, free speech would be seriously curtailed. For example, fair use is what allows critics to quote from the books they are reviewing — or to reprint art for purposes of discussion, as The Comics Journal does on this page*. And thanks to fair use I can tell you, despite the wishes of his estate, that in one letter James Joyce told Nora that he wanted to “fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shame of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair.” 10

The problem with fair use is that its application is not clear-cut. When a magazine like the Journal prints pictures for review purposes, there is no problem, because the people who own the pictures want the publicity, and are therefore unlikely to sue. The quote from James Joyce is a different story. The passage is quite brief and is being used in a critical article. Nonetheless, there is a small chance that the James Joyce estate could sue the Journal over this quote. Printing it, therefore, requires a calculation of benefits and risks.

The Journal made one determination in this instance. But it should come as no surprise that the threat of a costly lawsuit can be very effective in keeping unseemly material under wraps. For example, David Stowe, a professor at Michigan State University, wanted to reprint, for scholarly purposes, racist cartoons from the ’40s which were run in Downbeat, a jazz magazine. Downbeat refused to grant permission, because they found the images embarrassing. Stowe (very understandably) felt that he couldn’t risk the lawsuit 11.

THE OLD NEW VS. THE NEW OLD

Stowe has professional credentials and is doing nothing particularly original — scholarly critique is a well-established genre. He had a good chance of winning his case in court. Yet copyright law effectively silenced him. What, then, is the likely fate of artists who want to use old works for entirely new purposes? What can they expect from intellectual property law?

They can expect to have their asses sued, is what they can expect. Hip hop, the most innovative musical form of the last 25 years, has been shaped as much by lawyers as by artists. Some of the greatest albums in the genre — De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising, the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet — used a kind of sound-collage technique, interpolating multiple brief-but-recognizable samples into each of their songs. Lawsuits inevitably followed, and the result were rules that made indiscriminate sampling prohibitively expensive. Today rap artists either use one sample per song, or else use samples that are so brief and processed as to be unrecognizable. Some performers still work in the older style, mixing and matching beats and riffs from numerous other albums — people like DJ Z-Trip — but, because they can’t release their work commercially, they are permanently relegated to a quasi-legal underground. Similarly, copyright law has crippled the growth of “mash-ups” [a.k.a. “Bastard Pop” – Ed.], recordings in which the vocals from one record are digitally placed over the music of another record: The most famous is an inadvertent collaboration between Chuck D of Public Enemy and Herb Alpert. A few mash-ups have been released
commercially, but most, for obvious reasons, have not been. When DJ Danger Mouse put out a full-length CD mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album, the Beatles’ label, EMI, hit him with a cease-and-desist order. So he ceased and desisted 12.

But at least rap and all its stepchildren exist. Hip-hop pioneers figured out a way to capitalize on new technologies and old beats before the major labels could catch them. Copyright law has altered the genre — and undoubtedly for the worse — but it didn’t prevent it from coming into being.

If only comics could have been so lucky. Technological change has transformed the processing of images just as it has the processing of sounds. Photocopiers, scanners, Photoshop and the Internet have all made it easy to alter, combine and rework pictures and drawings in ways that would have been either dauntingly laborious or actually impossible 20 years ago. So where are the collage comics to rival ’80s hip hop? Where are the mash-ups of Dilbert and Prince Valiant? Where are the comics made up entirely of altered photographs, or tweaked advertisements? For that matter, where’s the American equivalent of doujinshi fan-fiction — a sub-industry in Japan that has contributed hugely to the popularity and creativity of comics in that country?

It’s not like I’m the first one to come up with these ideas.13 But few of them have been extensively explored, and thanks to copyright law, even fewer of them have been — or will be — exploited commercially. Meanwhile, DC and Marvel relicense the same damn stories with the same damn characters over and over again, an ongoing outburst of mediocrity enabled by federal fiat. Encouraged by copyright law, American comics treat the past like a kind of congealed, brittle monument, to be worshipped and imitated, but never used. No wonder the kids prefer manga.

ENDNOTES

1. For a discussion of what happens to a band financially when they sign with a major label, see Steve Albini, “The Problem With Music,” available online at http://www.negativland.com/albini.html. Go Back

2. Gerard Jones’ recent op-ed in the Los Angeles Times follows this same logic — comics aren’t any good, he argues, because the industry has historically failed to adequately compensate its writers and artists. See Gerard Jones, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s the Fading Future of Comics,” Los Angeles Times, February 15, 2005. Go Back

3. This is a slight alteration of a quote by Northrop Frye: “Poems are made out of other poems, novels are made out of other novels.” Go Back

4. I’ve always thought that Kurtzman’s parody of Jack Cole’s Plastic Man, itself a superhero parody, was one of the century’s meta-artistic highwater marks. Go Back

5. All of these characters are trademarked as well as copyrighted, so there would be restrictions on some uses. If you’re interested in finding out more about trademark law in the context of some of the issues I raise in this essay, a good place to start is the intellectual property page maintained by Negativland, a group of sound-collage artists. The address is http://www.negativland.com/news/?cat=5. Go Back

6. Registering your work with the copyright office does provide some benefits. See the government copyright office website: http://www.copyright.gov/register/. Go Back

7. A more complete discussion of the terms of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act can be found at http://www.keytlaw.com/Copyrights/sonybono.htm. The controversy around the act is discussed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sonny_bono_copyright_term_extension_act. Go Back

8. See http://www.eldred.cc/. The page also has links to information about Lessig’s unsuccessful efforts to challenge the Sonny Bono act on constitutional grounds. Lessig is one of the people behind Creative Commons, an organization designed to help artists make their work available to the public domain in certain circumstances. See http://creativecommons.org/about/.
I should also note that even the mild “orphaned art” reform suggested by Lessig has caused outrage in some quarters. American Society of Illustrator’s Partnerships (ASIP) — an umbrella group of artist’s trade organization — is vehemently opposed to Lessig’s efforts. ASIP member organization Illustrators’ Partnership of America sees the new copyright environment as an opportunity for visual artists to become the Mick Jaggers of the future, making oodles of money long after they’ve ceased making worthwhile (or even any) art. IPA’s philosophy (Mick Jagger and all) is outlined at http://illustratorspartnership.net/downloads/IN_2.pdf. Their discussion of Lessig’s proposal can be found at the IPA Orphan Works Blog, under the entry for February 10, 2005. Go Back

9. For a good discussion of the extent of fair use and of some other limitations on copyright, see Susan M. Kornfield, J.D., “A Principled Approach to Copyright Policymaking [.pdf],” available online as a PDF at http://www.umich.edu/~langres/copyright.pdf. Go Back

*: [Editor’s Note: The illustrations that accompanied Noah’s article in The Comics Journal were unavailable to include here. So, go get a copy and look at them there, so TCJ can continue to help feed and clothe nice people like Noah.] Go Back

10. A little more of this letter, and a further discussion of the controversy, can be found in Richard Zacks’ An Underground Education (Doubleday, 1997). According to Zacks, the whole series of letters can be found in The Selected Letters of James Joyce, edited by Richard Ellman (Viking, 1975; now out of print, but available in many libraries). [Ed.: Joyce’s racy letters to his common-law wife, Nora Barnacle.] Go Back

11. Stowe’s problems with Downbeat are discussed in Lydia Pallas Loren’s “The Purpose of Copyright [.pdf],” published in Open Spaces Quarterly, Vol. 2, #1, located online at http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-loren.php. Go Back

12. For a full discussion of the DJ Danger Mouse controversy, see http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,62276,00.html [Ed.: See also Electronic Freedom Foundation: “Grey Tuesday: A Quick Overview of the Legal Terrain“.] [Ed.: See also these PMJA favorites: djbc: The Boston Mash-up Project; Girl Talk, Feed the Animals; The Kleptones; Jay-Zeezer, The Black and Blue Album; DJ Lobsterdust – Queen vs. Satan ft. pastor Gary G. “It’s fun to smoke dust”.] Go Back

13. Lawrence Lessig has talked about doujinshi and copyright in his article “free culture,” available at http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/freeculture.lawrence.lessig/doc. In America, Paper Rad has flirted with copyrighted characters on occasion; and in a circumspect way, so has Alan Moore. See also http://castlezzt.net/, where some Garfield comics are altered. My first exposure to collage strips like this was probably 10 years ago, when I saw Nanonuts, a zine by my friends Bert Stabler and Mike Denlinger, in which Peanuts characters are hideously transformed. [Ed: See also Poor Mojo Newswire thread: “Elizabeth gets Raped in Tomorrow’s ‘For Better or for Worse’“. Anonymous message-board participants spontaneously detoured and hijacked the comics nearly effortlessly using common computer applications, until the postings were removed by the message board owner under threat of legal action. See also: Garfield Minus Garfield.] Go Back

Note: Hyperlinks added by Alan Benard, who is solely responsible for their appearance here except as included in the orginal text of the article. Hyperlink references updated March 6, 2010.

Update: You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

Utilitarian Review 3/6/10

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On HU

We started the week off with my six-year-old son commenting on Peanuts.

Suat offered an appreciation of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.l I still didn’t like it.

Richard surveyed current horror comics.

I explained why I hate Chip Kidd’s Peanuts book.

Vom Marlowe reviewed the manga A Wise Man Sleeps.

And this weeks download features mashups and more.

Utiltarians Everywhere

On Splice Today I review Johnny Cash’s last album.

At the Reader I survey my neighborhood’s bookstores.

And on tcj.com I review The Cartoon History of Economics.

Other Links

Tucker’s been on fire recently.

Shaenon has a highly entertaining take on the idiot copying panels from Bleach controversy.

Comics Comics brutally pwns TCJ.com again (and the rest of the comics blogosphere too) by doing the so-obvious-it’s-brilliant, and asking Jog to do his weekly previews on their site.

Alyssa Rosenberg is so so wrong to prefer Solange to Beyonce.