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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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.
“But copyleft actually allows me to make a middle class living as an artist for the first time in my life”
I really wonder about this. It seems like what has changed her financial fortunes is the fact that she has a hit. I think the copyleft story is maybe part of why it is a hit.
Which isn’t to take away from the quality of the movie, which despite my reservations, is certainly better than many things that are hits. But a good back story is often part of a hit…as is just random luck and having Roger Ebert plug you and so forth.
I guess the copyleft artistic model just doesn’t seem likely to transform, say, my career. If I stopped doing quasi work-for-hire reviews and my entirely work-for-hire educational writing and asked people to pay me what they thought my poetry or drawing was worth, I would not be earning a middle-class living (or any living), I assure you.
Of course, that could well be because I’m not as talented as Paley — but then really you’re just back to saying she has a hit or the talent to get a hit, which has little to do with the business model per se.
I do think that reductions in copyright would overall benefit artists, and might benefit some artists substantially (like people who do mashups, or documentary filmmakers.) But the idea that it’s going to make a middle-class lifestyle possible for a substantially larger number of artists seems unconvincing to me.
I should add, part of why it’s a hit is the enormous amount of work she put into it, her very impressive and imaginative skills as an animator, tenacity in the face of distribution and personal problems, etc. But those are the sorts of things which (with lots of luck, and then more luck) have always allowed some few artists to make a living.
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Noah, well, the model people usually cite as proof that you can earn money this way is free software, which has been contributing to the economic well-being of intelligent Finns since the mid-1980s. ;)
I don’t know any actual data on what kind of living people make in open source coding, though. It’s also a little harder to define the line between craft and ‘art’ in coding. And a lot of it is replicating the functionality of proprietary software. The motivation to pay for Open Office is largely the comparison with how many $ it costs to get Microsoft Office. If all software was open source, would people pay? Also, they make money servicing software, which doesn’t have a parallel in art.
I also don’t know whether the copyleft movement aims for a situation where the “entertainment industry” has an “open culture” community that parallels the open source one in software, such that people doing “craft” are also working in a copyleft environment, or whether they really are focused more on getting artists to resist the adhesion contracts offered to them by Big Entertainment Corps/fighting copyright term extensions.
I agree that the business model is very nebulous. But I also agree with the other side, that the current corporate-dominated model is just too restrictive. I think maybe the political plan-of-attack is just still in the evolving stages, but I guess we could email Lessig and ask. :-D
Yeah…open source software seems like a dubious model. Software is actually useful; it plugs into the economy in much clearer ways than art does.
I agree about the current corporate dominated system too, obviously.
I don’t think anybody makes money off Open Source by selling code or accepting donations. Billions are made on Open Source through providing related services like software customization and support. It’s a very successful and growing model used both by individuals and large, publicly traded corporations. However it’s not a model that translates well to art. Few people hire an author to rewrite the ending to a book because it doesn’t fit their exact needs.
In music, a popular Open Source analogue that I always hear being touted is Jonathan Coulton, who gives away his music, but manages to make a decent living through live performances and the occasional commercial gig, like writing the closing song to the video game Portal. An example for authors is Cory Doctorow, who releases all his books for free on the Internet, but still manages to make money from book sales.
To me, it looks like an increasing number of artists are slowly figuring out how to use the Internet leverage their free art into financial success, whether that be through contributions, advertising, performances, merchandise, or whatever. Sometimes I think the real reluctance to giving it away for free is that some concede the model allows for a decent living but does not allow an artist to become insanely rich off their work, which may or may not be true.
I don’t know…I don’t see why you couldn’t become insanely rich through live concerts or endorsements or what have you if you’re Beyonce.
I think there are ways to make a living in different copyright environments. Some of them still depend on a certain amount of protection, though (it’s harder to turn merchandise into paying product if you don’t have the exclusive right to your cartoons or whatever.)
I just think the environment where you’ve got a handful of super-successful performers and a lot of people squirming around on the bottom trying to be super-successful — I don’t think that’s because of copyright. I think it’s because communication technology makes it possible for everyone to listen to anything they want; you can listen to the best singer in the world, so the need for smaller, local acts just doesn’t exist the way it might have at one time in history. Paley touts niche markets, and the internet does create and enable them in some ways, but the real way you get lots of niche markets is through geographical and cultural separation, and the internet actually works against that.
I guess they’re virtual niche markets though. What the Internet eliminates is multiple instances of the SAME niche market.
Apparently there was a “Free Culture Forum” held in Barcelona last autumn where activists from around the world were trying to work out exactly what the political plan of action should be for this, and what all the various economic, technological and cultural implications were. There is a summary of the forum here and they have a wiki.
Their closing document says this:
“The current financial crisis has shown the severe limits of some previous models. On the other hand, the philosophy of Free Culture, a legacy of the Free/libre and Open Source Software movement, is the empirical proof that a new kind of ethics and a new way of doing business are possible. It has already created a new and workable form of production, based on crafts or trades, where the author-producer doesn’t lose control of the production process and can freed from production and distribution intermediaries. This form of production is based on autonomous initiative in solidarity with others, on exchange according to each person’s abilities and opportunities, on the democratisation of knowledge, education and the means of production and on a fair distribution of earnings according to the work carried out.”
That sounds more like a repackaging of fairly familiar anti-capitalist, anti-alienation language than actually “giving culture away.” In browsing through their materials, I think the middlin’ position you’ve been describing — shorter copyright terms with definite ends, fewer/more diverse middlemen, and various limitations on the copy rights that can be signed over to corporate entities — are more what the political movement is embracing.
Those materials are European, primarily, though, and the strategy may need to be different here than in the EU, but those goals make a lot of sense to me.
Yeah. I just find some of Paley’s semi-utopian claims/hopes hard to swallow. On the other hand, it’s hard to have an effective political movement without a utopian vision….
I would like to think an artist who is open with their art will have great financial success, although I’ve yet to see an example of somebody making it big financially on their own. Acts like Nine Inch Nail and Radiohead have made money by giving away their music, but only after establishing a huge and devoted fan base with the support of the old system. I’m still waiting for the first Internet Superstar.
Your point about the local act just doesn’t ring true to me. The world’s best singer, assuming he sings the music that I like, can’t be everywhere at once, and nothing replaces the experience of seeing art performed live while being part of an audience.
As is sometimes the case here, I think your definition of a word and mine are different. How do you define niche, because I think the Internet is all about generating niche communities. Sure, they may be centered on seemingly insignificant things, like Twilight, Home Brewing, or Lawnmower Racing. The point is, if you’re an artist who has a specific passion, there is probably an under-served community out there ready to support you.
Hey Bryan. People do still enjoy live performances, and that’s important. But you can also hear Celine Dion sing anywhere in the world simultaneously and all at once. As Paley says, attention is limited; the fact that you can have these megasuperstars infinitely reproduced all over the world sucks up a lot of air. Free culture isn’t going to change that, which means that we’re still going to have a system that is very much hit driven.
The internet does enable a lot of niche communities, as you say. And it does loosen things up in the sense that there are fewer gatekeepers needed. But it also makes connection easier..
Well, here’s an example I’ve been thinking about. Mashups are based around free culture, essentially, and ease of use. They’re given away for free; there aren’t any gatekeepers. And they can be great. But…they also tend to obsessively reproduce whatever the latest big hit is. If I had a dime for every mashup of “Single Ladies” or “Bad Romance” — well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I might have a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.
“The point is, if you’re an artist who has a specific passion, there is probably an under-served community out there ready to support you.”
And I just don’t think this is true. As always, getting support involves a combination of talent, interests, luck, hustle, and luck. The internet changes how this stuff works…but not in the sense that everyone just has to find their spot. The skill set is a little different — more advantage to people who have a passion for self-promotion, slightly less to people who have a real talent for schmoozing with gate-keepers. And you can argue that that’s a good thing. But that’s different from saying everyone can be a success, or even a limited success, as an artist.
In today’s creator-control news, Pink Floyd won their case against EMI.
Noah, I think you’re reading too much into what I said. Obviously, if your work stinks or you upset the wrong people you won’t succeed. Just because an audience exists doesn’t guarantee success. But, the Internet does cut down on the luck and work involved in finding your audience. At the same time, the chances are much higher on the Internet that the audience will find you. Also, an underserved audience tends to be more forgiving and supportive.
Hey Bry. I was still responding to Paley, mostly. But I take your points.
The Pink Floyd thing…that’s pretty funny. I can just see Roger Waters staring at Amazon.com, flecks of drool at the corner of his mouth, screaming, “Dark Side of the Moon” It’s a unified masterpiece! You have to listen to it all the way through every time!!!
Did I say freeing work is a magic bullet? I hope not. There’s not enough attention for everyone to “succeed”, whether the system is proprietary or free. I wrote about this recently:
http://blog.ninapaley.com/2010/02/26/quality-freedom-money-choose-two/
“People seem to want to believe that just freeing works is some magic recipe for success. It isn’t. But since people crave simple business models, I came up with one this morning:
Quality
Freedom
Money
______
Any Two = success
A very good (Quality) film can succeed if it is Free (Freedom) OR has a big promotional budget (Money). A Free film can succeed if it is very good (Quality) or, if it’s not so good, it has lots of paid promotion (Money, because if it’s not good people won’t promote it on their own initiative). A film with lots of Money will succeed if it’s good (Quality) or if it’s Free. Imagine how much further a crap film could go if it’s not only heavily advertised, but Free to share too.
With only one of these properties, a film is unlikely to succeed. If a film is very good but neither Free nor Moneyed, no one will hear about it and it won’t have a chance to become popular. A Free film that sucks won’t go far. A Moneyed film will garner attention only as long as it’s being promoted; once ad spending stops, audience attention goes away.
With all three of these elements, you’ll have a success the likes of which the world has never seen. Moneyed productions have yet to be Free, but maybe someday, for some reason, someone will pour tons of cash into promoting a Free, Quality production. Of course if it fails, that will be due to insufficient Quality, which can’t really be measured and for which no one wants to take responsibility. If someone wants to try this experiment with Sita Sings the Blues, which is already considered “good” and is forever “free,” be my guest!
Given the financial dire straits of the independent film industry, filmmakers should really be looking at Free, because they’re unlikely to have Money. And everyone, always, should be focused on Quality, no matter what business model they prefer. Except Quality is a mystery, and worrying about it does not lead to better Art. But if you happen to luck into some Quality, you know what to do now.”
Hey Nina! I still don’t agree with your expanded formula. You leave out luck, promotional smarts, luck, schmoozing, and also luck.
There is no formula for getting a hit, whether free or not. Even money and quality ensure nothing in particular.
Hi Nina! Thanks for joining in.
Your new webcomic, Mimi and Eunice, is adorable.
Noah: I wonder to what extent you can have success without having a “hit” in the sense we traditionally mean that word. I mean, isn’t a hit sort of the lottery? Surely there are degrees below that that would require less luck and schmoozing.
Success in art kind of is the lottery, is the thing.
I mean, yes, you can have greater or lesser levels of success, and some of those are enabled by the internet, and you can assure that some people look at your output by throwing lots of money at it…but in terms of getting some sort of sustainable living or even sustainable attention, I think it’s really more of a crap shoot than Nina is suggesting. And success relies at least as much on skills around self-promotion as it does on skills around making art (and I’m not down at self-promotion at all — those are useful and impressive skills to have — it’s just, if you don’t have them, the internet is not going to save you.)
Noah, you are confusing self-promotion with audience-promotion. The audience promotes the film. It is the audience, including film critics and journalists, who have raised the profile of “Sita.” Not me. Luck remains a huge factor; Free gives works far more opportunities to get lucky.
A free work won’t have the “hit” pattern of conventionally released works. The graph at the bottom of
http://questioncopyright.org/understanding_free_content
illustrates this.
Nina, I don’t agree with you at all. From everything I”ve seen, you are an extremely effective promotor of your own work. Which, again, I don’t think is anything to be ashamed of.
Also…the graph. Come on. That graph is pseudo-scientific nonsense. “Dark Side of the Moon” has not had a short shelf life. Neither has “Maus” for that matter. And free culture can be faddish just like anything else.
I don’t know whether it’s a plot of actual data points or not but it seems to me like the traditional part of the graph has some validity in that there are significantly more out-of-print books than in-print books, yes? Isn’t that one of the issues with Google Books?
It seems to me if you consider the entirety of all copyrighted works, the ones that are still in print after a handful of years, like Dark Side of the Moon or Maus, are probably statistical outliers (they could be included in the graph and still wouldn’t show on the line.)
Most of the old books that are still in print in bookstores are Classic Works of Literature that are in the public domain. You pretty much gotta go to a used bookstore to get random things more than 10 years old.
Disclaimer: I speak about books. Music may be different.
Sure. But just because something is out of print doesn’t mean all the copies disappear..and just because something is online for free doesn’t mean anyone is going to look at it. Ever.
I think the graph tries to cover this by saying the system will work if you content is “good”. And I think that’s nonsense. Popularity never has had any direct relation to quality, and it never will, even if everything is free.
True, but the artist doesn’t make any more money once the book is only available used. I don’t know how much artists get when the unsold copies from the print run are sold as remainders.
I think the point with the content being “good”, as well as the “audience promotion” is that copyleft works can be produced and distributed by the audience as well as advertised. And the cost/benefit equation is different for a small press or an individual than it is for a giant corporation with lots and lots of overhead.
Noah, you are correct that “just because something is online for free doesn’t mean anyone is going to look at it. Ever.” I agree with that. Nowhere do I argue against that. Given the scarcity of attention, copyright acts as a further obstacle to the success of works, and removing that obstacle is beneficial to works, artists, and the Public.
Attention is scarce. Copies of works are not. Do the math.
I don’t know that I think removing copyright entirely would necessarily benefit works, artists, and the public.
I think artists being able to limit reproduction through copyright actually benefits the public in certain ways. For instance, in China, it’s apparently difficult to figure out which Harry Potter books are by J.K. Rowling. With no copyright, you can easily get into a situation where it’s actually hard for consumers to find the actual thing they want in the sea of copies.
Or, again, as Jonathan points out, having copyright ensures he gets income from uses of his work by performers. You say, “well, they’ll pay if they feel like it.” But turning artists into charity cases doesn’t necessarily seem to me like it’s going to benefit anyone long term — least of all artists. In capitalism, you’re worth what you’re paid. If you’re constantly begging for money…
Our difference is really just one of degree, though, I think. I’m not willing to argue for no copyright, but I certainly think everyone would benefit if the copyright laws we have now were considerably loosened.
My focus is not on changing the laws – that is extremely unlikely. Copyright will become increasingly draconian, because of of our rather corrupt congress and campaign finance system.
Interestingly, I mentioned in the interview that back in the day, when women criticized misogyny in certain underground comics, they were accused of “trying to censor.” As I demonstrate viable alternatives to copy restrictions, people argue back as if I’m somehow trying to “remove copyright entirely.” I can’t remove copyright, and even if I could, I don’t support dictatorial, unilateral legislative changes that don’t reflect the will of the public – that’s how we got the copyright mess we’re in now.
What I am trying to do is increase public awareness of what copyright is (an artificial monopoly), how it works (through censorship), and what we can do in the midst of a broken system. Many wonderful opportunities exist for artists right now, but no one needs to take them. I win either way: if more works are freed, I live in a freer society, and if more works are locked up, my free works enjoy a competitive advantage. Hence my official position on copyright.
After rereading, I can’t tell if by “removing copyright entirely” you meant “from a specific work” (as I did with Sita) or “from the law” (which I can’t possibly do and probably won’t happen in our lifetimes, if ever). If the former, my apologies for thinking you implied the latter!
No I was referring to the latter.
“Interestingly, I mentioned in the interview that back in the day, when women criticized misogyny in certain underground comics, they were accused of “trying to censor.” As I demonstrate viable alternatives to copy restrictions, people argue back as if I’m somehow trying to “remove copyright entirely.”
It wasn’t clear to me that you were arguing solely for individual action rather than for some sort of legislative change. So my apologies for misinterpreting you.
You say:
“Attention is scarce. Copies of works are not. Do the math.”
Getting people’s attention is not a math problem, is the thing. That’s one of the reasons corporations haven’t figured out how to reliably guarantee hits, no matter how much money they throw at them. Success is elusive, and generalizing from your very specific circumstances can be misleading.
As an example, one way to catch people’s attention might be to develop a counter-intuitive marketing strategy tied to a politicized issue that lots of people care about. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, especially when the issue in question is really worthwhile. But I think it can maybe give you a distorted view of how successful the marketing strategy might be on its own merits.
I”m just really leery of offering any career advice to artists that doesn’t more or less begin and end by stressing the importance of luck and promotional abilities. I understand that it’s out of enthusiasm for a good cause, but I think when you offer formulas like this:
Quality
Freedom
Money
______
Any Two = success
you’re putting a toe into snake oil territory.
On the other hand, this seems unnecessarily grim:
“Copyright will become increasingly draconian, because of of our rather corrupt congress and campaign finance system.”
That’s certainly possible. It also seems possible that the activism by committed and inventive people like yourself might raise awareness of the issue sufficiently to make other political options possible. Our Congress isn’t any more corrupt than it’s ever been, I don’t think, and there have been more radical political changes than copyright reform in the past. But time will tell, I guess.
Rereading, I see you’re somewhat diffident about your formula — maybe not quite as diffident as I’d like, but I don’t know that the difference in diffidence is worth getting all that worked up about particularly.
In any case, thanks for agreeing to the interview for the blog, and for coming over here to chat as well!
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