FILMLIF log

update, june 22th 2009
[en] Karl Fogel and Nina Paley are pointing out an important additional fact: Nina still had to pay the copyright owners for the rights to use the songs (the compositions)! This is described in detail here: So the movie is freely licensed online. Anyone can make a commercial distribution and choose whether or not to share revenues with Nina Paley -- that is their freedom. But they have no choice about paying the monopolists who "own" these 80-year-old songs: for each commercial DVD sold to be completely legal, the copyright owners must be paid. Nina did finally (after much effort and expense) negotiate the owners down. The final figures are given at the above web page.

following the english translation of the article:

The main inspiration of the director Nina Paley is the contamination among different styles and cultures. Freedom of the author. The Creative Commons license is adopted to escape from the cage of copyright. By Daniele Salvini
Cheaper videocameras and portable video-editing systems: today it is easier for a movie's author to be his own producer. Even if the systems for the distribution are changing, (but) still the intermediaries between the artist and the audience are strong and they are able to inhibit the distribution of a work containing parts of past works. This is the case of the animation movie "Sita sings the Blues", realized in 5 years by the independent artist Nina Paley. The film is a pop musical work derived from the epic sacred text of Ramayana, telling the tragic romance between the gods Hindu Sita and Rama. Nina finds correspondences with her own love story and transforms the ancient tragedy into a coloured modern comedy on the background choreographic sound of the blues songs of the Twenties by Annette Hanshaw; a touching story of love and justice and the shout of a woman claiming equal rights. Nina found herself negotiating the use of blues songs of year 1929 with record industry majors, that asked 20,000 $ for each song; then she decided to release the movie with Creative Commons license, arguing that majors acted as bad parasites, that prefer to let the work, whose rights they own, die, instead of being satisfied of royalties proportioned to possibilities and the goals of the requester. Today, most of the common cultural elements are confined by un-ruled entites, having no cultural goals and no reference to the people who created these works. In USA the copyright was born with the goal to give the author a temporary monopoly on his own work, along the lasting of his working life, to encourage him to produce again; this is quite different from today's copyright, that extends up to 95 years without stimulating anything. The archetype of the protected cultural element is our common childhood friend, Mickey Mouse. The expiring of the right of the author coincides with its copyright, that every 20 years is prolonged of twenty years (last update was on 1998) and has passed the life of his author, so representing an abuse of copyright. Nina cares to underline that her choose was motivated by the desire to keep far from her work "Those oppressing, censuring and monopolistic hands; I choose a CC-Share-Alike license that will avoid forever to my work to be imprisoned by copyright". This case shows how an alternate artistic production system is growing, that enriches the dimension of Commons even allowing some retribution to the author: "I have chosen this license because it applies well to cultural works, I did not impose any commercial restriction, everyone is free to make money by selling contents from the film, this difference is important, you can sell DVDs containing the film. The content is the culture, containers are objects that can be sold, and people will pay more with pleasure when knowing that they are directly paying the artist." The artists, most of them, not the few talented stars that are carried as an example by the distributors, always depended by different sources of money: commissions, teaching, salaries and patronage. The copyright system does not carry any advantage to the artists, but to the industry that in fact defends its own privileges, calling them "rights", and showing the sad face of the artist to inspire sympathy. The English coach builders, at the coming of cars, imposed a law requiring that each car would have a person sit in the front, having the job to ring a bell and ask for permission, with the aim to delay the diffusion of their competitors, the cars, and increase their cost. A different distribution system, whether called p2p economy or decentralized payment system, will be possible thanks to the net, that allows a direct exchange among people, without the need of any intermediary. Nina thinks that an education is needed to contrast the pro-copyright campaign of the big media: "Like that claiming 'download is the same as stealing' that is simply false! Copyright was designed by distributors to help themselves, not the artists. I would like that the true story of copyright were known, together with questioncopyright.org I am preparing a project named Minute Memes, many animated short films on the artistic freedoms and the restrictions of copyright". www.sitasingstheblues.com
[thanks to Truman for the english translation]