Free Culture Activism
Because of obstacles in clearing the rights to Hanshaw's recordings for the Sita Sings the Blues, Paley took active part in the free culture movement.
Since 2009 she is an Artist-in-residence at QuestionCopyright.org non-profit organization, which includes running the projects "Minute Memes" and the "Sita Distribution Project". "Minute Memes" is a series of short ("one-minute") video "memes" about copyright restrictions and artistic freedom made by Paley. She wrote and performed the song "Copying Isn't Theft" meant to be freely remixed by other people, which she also made the animated clip to as the Minute Meme #1. Next animations in this series are "All Creative Work Is Derivative", EFF Tribute and "Credit is Due: The Attribution Song". She also made an illustrated guide to the idea of free content ("Understanding Free Content").
In 2010 she started new comic strip Mimi & Eunice, highlighting intellectual property problems and paradoxes.
She plans to publish much of her work, including "Nina’s Adventures", "Fluff", and all original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft licence. The website for Sita Sings the Blues includes a wiki where its fans contributed translated subtitles for the DVD of the film. On January 18, 2013, Nina posted on her blog that the copyright license for SSTB was being switched from CC-BY-SA to CC-0, thus placing the work into the public domain.
Paley won Public Knowledge organization's IP3 award in 2010 "for her work in intellectual property".
Read more about this topic: Nina Paley
Famous quotes containing the words free and/or culture:
“The modern picture of The Artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn’t see, to be high, live low, stay young forever—in short, to be the bohemian.”
—Tom Wolfe (b. 1931)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)