CORRECTION

 correction

Dear Journalists,

Some of you are writing that I was forced to choose the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license because the film is violating copyright. That is completely untrue, but has become the dominant motif of stories I read about the project. The confusion is understandable, so I attempt to sort it out below.

Sita Sings the Blues is 100% legal. I am free to release it commercially, which is why the film is gaining a number of commercial distributors in addition to its free sharing/audience distribution, which is also legal, and wonderful.

Sita Sings the Blues is in complete compliance with copyright regulations. I was forced to pay $50,000 in license fees and another $20,000 in legal costs to make it so. That is why I am in debt.  My compliance with copyright law is by no means an endorsement of it. Being $70,000 in the hole reminds me daily what an ass the law is. The film is legal, and that legality gives me a higher moral ground to stamp my feet upon as I denounce the failure that is copyright.

Having paid these extortionate fees, I could have gone with conventional distribution, and was invited to. I chose to free the film because I could see that would be most beneficial to me, my film, and culture at large. A CC-SA license does not absolve a creator of compliance with copyright law. The law could have sent me to prison for non-commercial copyright infringement. I was forced to borrow $70,000 to decriminalize my film, regardless of how I chose to release it.

Note that in some ways the film is not, and never will be free. For each disc sold, distributors must pay $1.65 to these faceless money sinks.  Transaction costs raise that amount to about $2.00 per disc. That is why my own Artist’s Edition is limited to 4,999 copies. I’ve already bled $50,000 into their vampiric maws; I have no intention of paying more.

Thank you for your attention.

Love,

–Nina

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My Wikimedia Rant

Note: Please, please continue uploading my comics to WikiMedia Commons, beloved uploaders! Nina’s Adventures is next. I completely endorse and support this work! Thank you! I love you! I post the rant below because, well, it’s on my mind now, and life isn’t perfect.

Continue reading “My Wikimedia Rant”

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The Hots return – and need your help

Remember this comic strip Stephen Hersh and I did for King Features Syndicate in 2002 – 2003?sunhannahwrongcolorsm.jpg

Well, we’re releasing ALL of them to EVERYONE under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license!

But this project needs your help. I’ve assembled all the strips I could find and put them in two giant zipped folders (one for B&W dailies, one for color Sundays), which I uploaded here on archive.org. But someone – anyone – now needs to convert the TIFF files to PNG and upload them one at a time to Wikimedia Commons, where they can be read, shared, and enjoyed by everyone.

Feel free to come up with a better file naming protocol than the examples here. In order to convert the Sunday color files to PNG, they must first be mode-changed from CMYK to RGB.

dishrack640.png

The Black-and-white files should be converted from bitmap to greyscale before saving as PNG and uploading. We also need descriptions and welcome any other relevant data anyone wants to add.

UPDATE: Holly Duthie has done all the color mode and file conversions!  The new PNG files are here:

http://www.archive.org/details/HotsDailies.GS.PNGs.zip (dailies)
http://www.archive.org/details/HotsSundays.GS.PNGs.zip (Sundays in B&W)
http://www.archive.org/details/HotsSundays.RGB.PNGs.zip
(Sundays in full color)

Thanks Holly!

Now we just need others to download the PNGs from archive.org, and upload them one at a time to wikimedia.org, with any relevant data.

Thank you for sharing!

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More (C)ensorship

Amazon erased purchased e-books from consumers’ Kindles. Wait’ll you find out what books. This is an inevitable consequence of Digital Restrictions Mongering.

Meanwhile, US courts banned a book using ©ensorship law!

©ensorship men's tshirt

Now’s as good a time as any to plug QuestionCopyright.org‘s ©ensorship T-shirts. They’re actually quite inexpensive, and wearing them does a huge public service as you educate people around you.

“Wearing them really works, by the way. I wore one on a train recently and wound up having a great conversation about copyright with two people, one of them a musician coming back from a gig, after they asked me about the front.” –Karl Fogel

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Sita DVD Release Party

Celebrate FilmKaravan‘s new Creator Endorsed distribution* of the Sita Sings the Blues DVD!

When: Tuesday, July 28, 6:30-8:30 PM
Where: Interieurs | 151 Franklin Street between Hudson & Varick (map)
Entry Fee: $15* Cash/Check @ door (all proceeds go towards the SSB distribution campaign)
*Includes OPEN BAR, Kebabs and a free SSB DVD ($19.99 value)

RSVP to info@filmkaravan.com or payal1202@gmail.com by Friday July 24, 2009

More info on facebook

I will be there, along with some original paintings from the film, and prints, and other merch including brand new “Hanuman” cloisonne pins, not yet available anywhere else!

51mtio5anll_sl500_aa240_.jpgdfhxjjvr_86hk8vmvhg_b.jpeg

Continue reading “Sita DVD Release Party”

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