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Nina Paley’s Sita Sings The Blues, released online a little over two months ago, has been generating great press and even greater viewership, closing in on 70,000 downloads at archive.org alone. For the non-inundated, there is great background information on the film at Paley’s website. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Paley about the film – we touched on the film’s aesthetics and plot points, but perhaps most interesting to those in the CC community is Paley’s decision to utilize our copyleft license, Attribution-ShareAlike, and her thoughts on free licensing and the open source movement in general. Read on to learn more about the licensing trials and tribulations associated with the film’s release, how CC has played a role, and Paley’s opinions on the Free Culture movement as a whole. RamSitaGods, Nina Paley | CC BY-SA One of the major stories surrounding Sita Sings The Blues been your use of songs by musician Annette Hanshaw and the back-and-forth dialogue you have had with the copyright owners as a result. Can you explain why you used these songs? The songs themselves inspired the film. There would be no film without those songs. Until I heard them, the Ramayana was just another ancient Indian epic to me. I was feebly connecting this ancient epic to my own experiences in 2002. But the Hanshaw songs were a revelation: Sita’s story has been told a million times not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American Blues. Hers is a story so primal, so basic to human experience, it has been told by people who never heard of the Ramayana. The Hanshaw songs deal with exactly the same themes as the epic; but they emerged completely independent of it. Their sound is distinctively 1920’s American, and therein lies their power: the listener/viewer knows I didn’t make them up. They are authentic. They are historical evidence supporting the film’s central point: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place and culture. What is this story? Sita is a goddess/princess/woman utterly devoted to her husband Rama, the god/prince/man. Sita’s story moves from total enmeshment and romantic joy (Here We Are, What Wouldn’t I Do For That Man) to hopeful longing separation (Daddy Won’t You Please Come Home) to reunion (Who’s That Knockin’ At My Door) to romantic rejection (Mean to Me) to reconciliation (If You Want the Rainbow) to further rejection (Moanin’ Low, Am I Blue) to hopeless longing (Lover Come Back to Me,) back to love – this time self-love (I’ve Got a Feelin’ I’m Fallin’). Sita’s role is to suffer, especially through loving a man who rejects her. Women especially connect emotionally to her story and these emotions are clearly expressed in songs. As Nabaneeta Dev Sen writes in “Lady sings the Blues: When Women retell the Ramayana”: But there are always alternative ways of using a myth. If patriarchy has used the Sita myth to silence women, the village women have picked up the Sita myth to give themselves a voice. They have found a suitable mask in the myth of Sita, a persona through which they can express themselves, speak of their day-to-day problems, and critique patriarchy in their own fashion. Sen is talking about the songs of Indian village women, but she could just as easily been talking about American Blues. That is the point of Sita Sings the Blues: we all struggle with this story, which connects humans through time, space and culture, whether we’re aware of it or not. Just as the Ramayana has mostly been written down and controlled by men, the songs in Sita Sings the Blues were mostly written by men; but sung by a woman – Hanshaw – they pack an emotional wallop and express a woman’s voice. The synchronicity of the Hanshaw songs and Sita’s story is uncanny. This impresses audiences and allows the film’s point to be made: the story of the Ramayana transcends time, place and culture. Because the songs feature an authentic voice from the 1920’s, they demonstrate that this story emerged organically in history. New songs composed by the director, while they could be entertaining, could not make that point. They would be a mere contrivance, whereas the authentic, historical songs give weight to the film’s thesis. They are in fact the basis of the film’s thesis, irrefutable evidence that certain stories – like the story of Sita and Rama – are inherent to human experience. Upon reading the above, Karl Fogel added: Using something that already exists demonstrates that the universality of your theme is external to yourself. Whereas causing something new to exist wouldn’t achieve the same effect. Instead, it would be circular: it would demonstrate that the artist has the ability to make more of what she’s already making. So rather than being connective or expanding, it would be narcissistic (just in a descriptive sense, not necessarily a pejorative one). There has to be a reason so many composers, even non-Catholic ones like Bach, set the Latin Mass to music instead of making up their own words. (Hmm, now imagine if those words had been monopoly-restricted… 🙂 ). What has your experience been in trying to get permission it use Hanshaw’s music in the film, and the current state of affairs? Because distributors were going bankrupt right and left in 2008, it was no longer possible to sell an indie film to a distributor for big money and then “have them take care of” the licenses. Since in February of 2008, when the film premiered in Berlin, I was not yet a Free Culture convert, I thought I needed a conventional distributor. So it fell on me to clear the rights. I had to pay intermediaries to contact the license holders, since they don’t speak to mere riff raff like me; they’re too busy, and under no obligation to do so. Even before that, I needed legal help to research who owned the rights in the first place, since there’s no central copyright registry any more, and rights are traded like baseball cards between corporations. Luckily, I was aided by the student attorneys of the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic of American University. Anyway, in 2008 a lawyer charged me $7,000 to get this response from the licensors: an estimate of $15,000 to $26,000 per song, AFTER I’d paid a $500 per song Festival License. (Festival Licenses last one whole year and require a promise to not make any money showing the film. So a festival license isn’t enough to get the “week-long commercial run” required for Academy Award qualification. Now that “Sita”‘s been broadcast, she will never qualify for an Academy nomination; if I’d really wanted one, I would have had to delayed the release of the film for another year. But I digress.). Even though we made it explicitly clear the entire budget for the film was under $200,000, the licensors came back with the “bargain” estimate of about $220,000. It was simply not possible for me to acquire that kind of money. So legally, my only option was to not show the film or commit civil disobedience. I hired another intermediary, a “rights clearance house” which is less expensive than a lawyer, and they negotiated the “step deal” I eventually signed. This brought the price tag of the licenses down to $50,000, but with many restrictions. If more than 5,000 DVDs (or downloads) are sold, I must pay the licensors more. I wrote about this at length on my website. I borrowed $50,000 to pay these licenses for several reasons. First, to reduce my liability. I may still be sued for releasing the film freely online – after all, the licensors may interpret free sharing as “selling” for zero dollars – but I’ll only be sued for breach of contract, not copyright infringement. Copyright infringement carries much harsher penalties, including possible jail time. I also wanted to make free sharing of “Sita” as legal, and therefore legitimate, as possible. Sharing shouldn’t be the exclusive purview of lawbreakers. Sharing should – and can – be wholesome fun for the whole family. I paid up to indemnify the audience, because the audience is Sita’s main distributor. So it’s now legal to copy and share Sita Sings the Blues. The files went up on Archive.org in early March 2009 and have spread far and wide since. Having paid off the licensors, I could have chosen conventional distribution. But I chose a CC BY-SA license to allow the film to reach a much wider audience; to prohibit the copyrighting – “locking up” – of my art; to give back to the greater culture which gave to me; to exploit the power of the audience to promote and distribute more efficiently than a conventional distributor; and to educate about the dangers of copy restrictions, and the beauty and benefits of sharing. As a result of the trouble you’ve had in regards to Annete Hanshaw’s music, you have turned into a self-proclaimed Free Culture activist. Was this shift gradual? What has that experience in particular informed your views on copyright, fair use, and the public domain? Annette Hanshaw was immensely popular in the late 1920’s. Now almost no one’s heard of her. Why? Because of copy-restrictions. I met many talented filmmakers on my “festival circuit.” Most had conventional distribution deals, but it’s very hard to see any of their films, which had small, brief theatrical runs, and then were never heard from again. Why? Copy-restrictions. I’m an artist. I need money to live, but even more importantly I need my art to reach people. A $10,000 advance in return for having my work locked up for 10 years is a devil’s bargain. More than anything, I wanted people to see my film – now and in years to come. My turning point in choosing a CC license happened in October of 2008. “Sita” had just opened the San Francisco Animation Festival, and I’d disclosed to the audience we’d all just done something illegal. It’s always great to share the film on a big screen in a theater with an audience, and this one was particularly enthusiastic. The next morning I woke up realizing that a free release online wouldn’t in any way prevent theatrical screenings. Why had I never considered that before? Because the film industry insists people won’t go to theaters if they can see a film online. But that’s not true of me, nor many cinephiles. When I lived in San Francisco my favorite movie outings were to classic films at the Catsro: 2001, Nights of Cabiria, Modern Times, Mommy Dearest. These are all available on home video, but I went to the Castro for the big screen and the dark room and the shared experience. If enough people watched and liked “Sita” online, there’d be demand for it in cinemas. And so far that’s proving true. In particular, how have you viewed CC licenses in this whole process? What was your motivation to release Sita Sings the Blues under a CC BY-SA license? Why did you choose that license and not another CC license? What are the obstacles and benefits you’ve seen in using CC licenses? I want my film to reach the widest audience. It costs money to run a theater; it costs money to manufacture DVDs; it costs money to make and distribute 35mm film prints. It’s essential I allow people to make money distributing Sita these ways and others; otherwise, no one will do it. So I eschewed the “non commercial” license. Share Alike would “protect” the work from ever being locked up. It’s better than Public Domain; works are routinely removed from the Public Domain via privatized derivatives (just try making your own Pinocchio). I didn’t want some corporation locking up a play or TV show based on Sita. They are certainly welcome to make derivative works, and make money from them; in fact I encourage this. But they may not sue or punish anyone for sharing those works. I looked to the Free Software movement as a model. The CC BY-SA license most closely resembles the GNU GPL, which is the foundation of Free Software. People make plenty of money in Free Software; there’s no reason they can’t do the same in Free Culture, except for those pernicious “non commercial” licenses. A Share Alike license eliminates the corporate abuse everyone’s so afraid of, while it encourages entrepreneurship and innovation. Everyone wins, especially the artist! What else would you like our reader’s to know? Any plans for the future? I’d love you all to read my essay Understanding Free Content and of course watch the film! I’m currently busy making “containers” like DVDs and T shirts available now at our e-store. QuestionCopyright is my main partner in releasing Sita; we’re trying to prove a model in which freedom and revenue work together. We know other filmmakers are watching what happens to Sita, and we’d like to show that yes, you can make money without impinging on everyone else’s freedom. I’m also negotiating with theatrical distributors in France and Switzerland, as well as a couple book publishers. I’m negotiating not “rights” to the film, which belong to everyone already, but rather my Endorsement and assistance. To understand how this works, please read about the Creator Endorsed Mark. Once I have the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire started, I hope to work on short musical cartoons about free speech – you can hear one of the songs here. There’s more where that came from. Really, I have more ideas than I have time to implement them – a happy yet vexing problem. I also hope to have all my old Nina’s Adventures and Fluff syndicated comic strips scanned and uploaded at high resolution onto archive.org under a CC BY-SA license. The University of Illinois Library is currently seeking funding to move ahead on this project – interested individuals should contact Betsy Kruger. Lastly, I’m still looking for money, although the Sita Sings the Blues Merchandise Empire should be generating some in a few months. Still, I plan to apply for grants and fellowships. Any foundations with too much money burning a hole in your accounts, please get in touch.
In this text, it dives into how Ramayana as a text is so universal that any set of tunes or music can match it. For example, this text looks into how the music from Annette Hanshaw from the 1920's are able to blend into the Indian epic showing its versatility. One challenge that readers might resonate to is the copyright issues that Paley faced in order to have permission to use Hanshaw's music since there were many legal problems and a bunch of fees. Because of this struggle, it highlights why it can be difficult to use certain words in conjunction with other pieces which might explain why we might not see the types of works that we would like. Even looking at the copyright license that Paley chose for her own film, she chose the one that would allow her to reach a larger group of people because her goal is not to make money but to appreciate art for what it is and to share that with other people. The copyright restrictions that are discussed in this text can be eye-opening for a lot of readers as they can see why creativity might be hindered in a lot of fields and this can help explain why. In this text, the concepts of culture and national identity are closely related to the idea of self. This can be seen in Ramayana as its themes are universal and the ability for it to mesh well with the American Blues songs is proof of that. Not to mention, this is an example that serves to show that cultures can blend together in which a person's self can be a multitude of different aspects reflecting in how modern nation-building does not just rely on one perspective or facet, but it can have many different facets allowing that identity to be fluid as a result. The Indians relating to Ramayana may see themselves as "us" because they resonate to that Indian epic while "them" represents those who know more about the American Blues or western culture in general. With this being said, this contrast in cultures being able to blend and mesh well together show how there is shared human experiences across cultures. There is no sense of otherness in Paley's work because she is able to show how the themes in Ramayana are universal and can be applied to all time periods and all locations. Even though the argument is that Ramayana is universal and can blend with any music types, the choice of American Blues is compelling by Paley and this intention was because she may have wanted to see how English lyrics can mesh with Sanskrit language as a challenge and this weird combination can prove that it would work with all music types as a result. Because of this contrast, it speaks to the power of linguistic authenticity as it is able to prove the themes behind the film and put them into action. The difficulty that Paley faced with copyright laws help explain why people cannot be as creative as they want and why free sharing should exist. As a result, Paley allows her work to be easily more accessed which can be seen in her creative commons license and shows that she backs up the same claim from her own film as well. It shows why artists and all people should move away from exclusive ownership and should embrace a more collaborative model in which all people can contribute and take inspirations from each other in positive ways. CC BY Ajey Sasimugunthan (contact)
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en.wikisource.org en.wikisource.org
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For, be assured, ye my compeers in age, 780 Not all of us, of yore these powers who held, Shall e'er be proven to have wrought such ills.
Hubris is something that is explored a lot in this text and this is the realization that hubris is the biggest reason as to why the Persians ended up losing this war. It paints a very clear image for the readers in which Xerxes embraces the fact that his own hubris led the Persians to their own downfall and shows the importance of respecting your own foes. Even if they are not foes, people should always respect the opposition because they can never anticipate winning against them because an upset can always happen. If you think about it, the mindset between both groups of people explain why one group won while the other is still trying to process their loss. The Greeks had more of a "we" mindset in which they were fighting together and were fighting for their land as a unit. On the contrary, the Persians do not respect one another and does have a lot of pride in their empire. They appreciate the empire because of the social status it holds as the Persians like to view themselves as superior to other people. In this manner, the arrogance explains why they underestimated the Greeks leading to the Persians losing as a result. The high point in this text was towards the beginning because that is when the Persians did not lose and felt very good about their chances of beating the Greeks. After that moment, the moments afterward becomes low points since the fall of Persia never has a good ending in which their resolution is coming to terms with their loss and understanding the reasons behind why this happened. CC BY Ajey Sasimugunthan (contact)
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Ah, woe is me for ruin of the host! Oh nightly vision manifest in dreams, 520 To me how surely didst thou ills portend
Atossa's line is significant as it points to the disappointing and rather large embarrassing loss that will be faced because of the loss. It shows how Persia will be in a state of dismay and that there is no going back and how their hubris is the reason behind the actions that will follow soon. Through the use of diction, words such as "woe" and "ruin" help highlight the depth and attention to detail on how many people died fighting for this war and how the Persians can no longer stand proud because of this humiliating defeat. Because of the vivid language that is used, the reader is able to feel the emotional toll of Atossa and can understand the grief and allows them to feel sympathy as well. It relates to a modern day theme relating to loss and human experience as everyone at some point in their lives will have to go through losing a close family member or friend. This theme resonates through time and relates to modern readers as people always long for understanding during these brutal times. When reading this text, it is important to think about how the Persians have a great amount of pride in their empire and see it with lots of prestige. They believe that no other peoples can compare to them and being Persian is hugely tied to their sense of self which is important. Because of the defeat that they have faced, it is a huge blow to their empire, but not only that, it is a huge blow to themselves because they viewed their empire as being invincible and seeing it become a loser makes them feel very sad and angry at the same time because there is also confusion on how they should think about the empire that they grew up in. Comparing this to the Greeks, they are viewed as the people fighting for their freedom in which they are a threat to the Persians. They stood together more like a team compared to the Persians because their backs were against the wall and that pressure allowed them to perform at their best in order to pull away with the win. Even though the Persians carry themselves with a lot of pride, they lacked qualities in resilience and patriotism like the Greeks leading to their loss. For this text, the "us" would be the Persians while the "them" is the Greeks. Diction is interesting throughout the text because the Persians are described as "barbaric" and even "Asiatic" which shows how they viewed themselves as superior and this hubris led them down the path they are in now. On the contrary, more respectful words are used to show admiration of the Greeks because they are fighting for their freedom and are morally in the right during this fight. The images that a reader can imagine between these two groups are very varying as the Persians are seen to be a massive and overwhelming force. While for the Greeks, they seem to be modest but still very disciplined and heroic for fighting what is rightfully theirs. The clear lowest point in the text would be when the Persians suffer their defeat because they are no longer this unbeatable empire and have lost at the hands of the Greeks who were not favored to win. In addition, the tone of the text greatly changes after the Persians lose because their image is no longer the same and we can see how the characters embrace this new reality of their defeat. Even though the Persians took pride in their empire, they did not necessarily embrace their group like the Greeks who were willing to fight the hardest for their land and saw one another as equals in which they wanted to help each other. CC BY Ajey Sasimugunthan (contact)
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- Jan 2022
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"Memory," said Aeschylus, "is the mother of all wis- dom."
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