I hired a developer who started building a beautiful new system in Ruby on Rails, only to discover that [...]]]> So I missed my whole trip to California due to a badly-timed cold. Which means I have lots of time on my hands to bang my head into the wall that is the Mimi & Eunice web site.

I hired a developer who started building a beautiful new system in Ruby on Rails, only to discover that my web host, Media Temple, has a relatively wonky and outdated Ruby setup. That led the site to disappear for a few days. It’s potentially a really nice system (though it still has some kinks in it), but I may have to switch web hosts if I want to rely on it.

So I started uploading the strips in plain old WordPress, which is excellent in all ways but one some: the images don’t show up in all RSS feeders, they don’t show up in Facebook, and I can’t find a way to generate simple embed code for them. What am I talking about? Behold what I want, as shown on the fine comics site qwantz:

See that code it automatically generates that lets you embed any comic? I spent a day searching for a wordpress plugin that does that, and still can’t find one. Help?

And I don’t know why my Mimi & Eunice comics don’t show up in the RSS Feed in Firefox, but they do in other browsers. I already did this, and installed the AbsoluteRSS plugin. But I still can’t see the images in Firefox. Help?

I just want Mimi & Eunice to be as easily shared as possible. Help appreciated, but please don’t suggest ComicPress. Been there, done that, it has a lot of problems. Also my budget is exhausted of $$ to pay for consultants, since the Ruby on Rails project consumed it all. The nice thing about the simple WordPress setup is that each comic displays at a small size (640 pixels wide) but links to a high-res (2400 pixels wide) image suitable for printing. That’s important to me, because I want to encourage all kinds of sharing, including paper publishing. The current site has all the features I want except image embedding. Please tell me there’s a solution. Thanks. I love you.

Update: Brett Thompson has made an embed code generator for Mimi & Eunice! It looks big and text-y today but Brett says he will spruce up its appearance tomorrow. But you can start embedding Mimi & Eunice comics RIGHT NOW!

On Friday, May 28, I attended a NY Philharmonic performance of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre.

All patrons were required to pass through long “security” lines and have our bags searched by guards. Those carrying cameras were forbidden from entering the auditorium and ordered to check their bags in an even longer line.

New Yorkers tolerate “security” [...]]]> Dear Lincoln Center,

On Friday, May 28, I attended a NY Philharmonic performance of Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre.

All patrons were required to pass through long “security” lines and have our bags searched by guards. Those carrying cameras were forbidden from entering the auditorium and ordered to check their bags in an even longer line.

New Yorkers tolerate “security” searches because they remember the falling of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. They are willing to be treated as suspected terrorists and “guilty until proven innocent” criminals because they fear for their physical safety. They rationalize Lincoln Center’s “security” policy because they don’t want anyone bringing a bomb or weapon into a large closed space containing thousands of vulnerable people.

But cameras are not a security threat. In fact, citizen cameras increase security, and their forced removal puts us in greater danger. In the unlikely event a terrorist were able to bring a weapon into the auditorium, citizens carrying cameras would document it. Presumably Lincoln Center has its own “security” cameras, but no fixed, closed surveillance system is as effective as citizens.

I don’t trust Lincoln Center’s “security” to protect me or anyone; they are incompetent at actual security, effective only at treating patrons like suspected criminals, creating long tedious lines, and converting what was once an uplifting cultural experience into something resembling a visit to an airport. I can visit the airport for free, but being treated like a criminal at Lincoln Center cost close to $100.

After being ejected from a very long security line to enter the theater, and redirected to stand in an even longer line to the coat check, I moved my camera from  my large bag into my small purse and found another entrance to the auditorium. This line’s “security” guard did not see or feel a camera, so I was allowed in. That let me know how effective the “security” guards would be at detecting a weapon or any genuine threat: not at all. Lincoln Center’s “security” did not make me feel “secure” – quite the opposite – but it did make me feel harassed.

Why does Lincoln Center treat cameras its greatest threat to “security”? Does the organization believe that photographing its productions is “stealing”? Let me remind you that anyone who wants to copy images of Lincoln Center’s copyrighted material, is physically capable of doing so. Photos of Lincoln Center and its productions circulate in Lincoln Center’s advertising, in print and on the internet. Lincoln Center has Copyright law to protect them against such illegal image-copying. Copyright law also applies to any unauthorized photos taken by audience members. Lincoln Center may ban taking photographs in its auditoria without confiscating cameras themselves. Galleries and other performance spaces do this: they have signs that say NO PHOTOGRAPHS. Banning cameras in the theater does absolutely nothing to “protect” anyone. It does however abuse legitimate theater patrons, the ones who bought expensive tickets expecting a civilized experience. Furthermore, banning citizen cameras makes it impossible for citizens to document real danger, thereby lessening everyone’s real security.

People dress up to go to Lincoln Center. They pay hundreds of dollars. They believe it’s important to support the arts. In return, Lincoln Center treats its patrons like criminals, and exploits their fears of terrorism to enforce a misguided, dangerous, and invasive no-camera policy.

Lincoln Center should abandon its dangerous and harassing “security” policies and return to respecting its patrons.

Sincerely,

–Nina Paley
Art Lover

Dear Journalists Dear Journalists, bloggers, commenters, etc.,

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 [...]]]> I’m reposting this (originally posted July 2009) because misinformation continues to spread all over the interwebs. Maybe I’ll post it every month.

Dear Journalists Dear Journalists, bloggers, commenters, etc.,

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

My goodness, no one seems to know what grand juries are! I sure didn’t, until this week. Because they’re called “juries,” people think they’re trial juries. Not at all! Here’s a good article explaining how grand juries work by activist Craig Rosebraugh.

Grand Juries, often referred to as the “strong [...]]]>

My goodness, no one seems to know what grand juries are! I sure didn’t, until this week. Because they’re called “juries,” people think they’re trial juries. Not at all! Here’s a good article explaining how grand juries work by activist Craig Rosebraugh.

Grand Juries, often referred to as the “strong arm of the court system,” thrive off public ignorance, working behind closed doors and under seemingly little regulation. Often working in accordance with the Justice Department, the Grand Jury system has been, and continues to be, used for gathering intelligence and suppressing “radical” groups and organizations that oppose current governmental policies.

…..

In my experience, the most fascinating aspect about Grand Juries is that the public is largely misinformed and kept in the dark about their true nature. Most citizens do not realize that an individual called before a Grand Jury has neither the right to counsel nor Fifth Amendment protection in the proceedings. I have found that people from all walks of life are outraged when they learn of this reality.

It is this very secrecy and deception that has allowed Grand Juries to persist. It is a simple rule that says if no one is informed, no one will object.  (link)

I don’t know if it’s legal for me to write this, but I must say that so far my grand jury experience resembles the Milgram Experiment. That’s the one where an authority instructs an “average person” to administer painful electric shocks to someone else. As long as the authority figure tells them it’s ok, the “average person” just keeps pushing that shock button, ignoring the victims’ screams of agony because the authority instructs them to. Likewise, the prosecuting attorneys instruct us to ignore any details about cases they don’t control; if we ask questions about other charges, they say that’s none of our business. We don’t get to see or hear our victims; we have only authorities telling us to push the button. In a sealed, secret room. I’ve sat on my hands a number of times, but believe me, most people are happy to comply with the authorities. They know not what they do, and the system likes it that way.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.^[4]

Please understand what grand juries are. They need to be abolished, as they have been almost everywhere outside the United States.

“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.” – John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government

“Most thinkers…hold that you own your own life, and it follows that you must own the products of that life, and that those products can be traded in free exchange with others,” claims [...]]]>

“Every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has a right to, but himself.”
– John Locke, Second Treatise on Civil Government

“Most thinkers…hold that you own your own life, and it follows that you must own the products of that life, and that those products can be traded in free exchange with others,” claims Wikipedia’s latest entry on property. “Every man has a property in his own person,” says John Locke. Ayn Rand (who I generally can’t stand, but who I’m happy to quote as a passionate defender of the sanctity of property) wrote, “Just as man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results, which means: the right of property.”

You also have a property in your own MIND. That which lives in your mind, is your property. And everyone deserves Rand’s “right to translate one’s rights into reality, to think, to work and keep the results” – in other words to freely think, express, and own the contents of their own mind. That is what “intellectual property” should (but doesn’t) mean: everyone’s right to their own mind.

Instead, legally defined “Intellectual Property” means exactly the opposite: it transfers ownership of the contents of your mind to others. It alienates the ideas in your mind, from you. Is there a song running through your mind right now? It doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to Warner-Chappell. You are forbidden to express it; “performance” requires permission. “To think, to work” – interpret – “and keep the results” – record and sell copies of -  the song in your mind, are illegal.

Thus Intellectual Property gives alien, private owners title to our minds. We may think culture (songs, text, images) only in secret; any expressions of cultural thought belong not to the thinker, but to the IP owner. Your thoughts are “derivative works”; someone else has title to them. You may have “Porgy and Bess” in your mind, but interpreting or singing it out loud is forbidden. That part of your mind belongs to Gershwin’s heirs and their lackeys.

Wikipedia’s entry on Chattel Slavery states: “The living human body is, in most modern societies, considered something which cannot be the property of anyone but the person whose body it is.” The living human mind should be the same. Legally defined “Intellectual Property” is, quite simply, someone else’s ownership of your mind. If they own the right to express what lives in your mind, the right “to think, to work and keep the results,” then they own your mind; they own you. What can we call that, except slavery?

MY WIKIMEDIA RANT

PROLOGUE: July 24, 2009 I wrote the rant below yesterday and emailed it [...]]]> 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.

MY WIKIMEDIA RANT

PROLOGUE:
July 24, 2009
I wrote the rant below yesterday and emailed it to my friend Mike Caprio, who responded:

There’s a really long history of this kind of thing with Wikipedia. I think it’s worthwhile to take a look at the (quite long) essay that Jason Scott wrote 5+ years ago on the subject. When he posted this, it caused a tempest in the teapot, and then that tempest lead to a lot of major news outlets questioning Wikipedia itself – you may not want to tread again over the same paths that he did, or people might not pay close enough attention to what you’re trying to say. To Jason’s credentials: he’s basically a well-spoken techie guy who’s been online forever and has basically gotten himself one way or another into the middle of just about every major phenom that’s crawled up out of the Internet. For bonus points, check out the second article entitled “Swastikipedia”.

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/808

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/847

So I’m wandering down a well-trod path.

MY WIKIMEDIA RANT:
July 23, 2009

I spend most of my time trying to show other artists that it’s “safe” to free their art under CC-SA – that Free Culture is a superior alternative to the world of proprietary culture, with its attendant gatekeepers and commercial censors.

Within 12 hours of making my very first Wikimedia Commons user page, an admin judged it:
“a pretty promotional page with links on & equally appear to promote someone’s commercial work” and deleted it.

So my first experience of Wikimedia feels not like an alternative to the proprietary culture industry I disdain; it feels the same, in the worst way. In the commercial world, an individual with the authority to determine whether others see works submitted is kindly called a “gatekeeper.” The proprietary culture industries are called the “gatekeeper system.” The system fails because a handful of individuals are vested with the authority to make or break works, to decide whether or not they get exposed to a larger audience. These individuals simply aren’t competent to judge everything they are entrusted to filter. Overworked individuals even less so; they don’t feel they can afford the time to do rudimentary research, or learn anything about the subject in question.

If I weren’t 100% committed to Free Culture, I would have read the “out of scope” message and left, not to return. I know Wikimedia is a community which has its own ways of doing things, and I should learn (I tried, by the way – my best efforts led to an almost instant deletion, and I’m a lot more savvy than most artists), it’s all part of the “noob” experience, etc. I complain here because as tight a community as Wikimedia is, it is part of a larger world of Knowledge. I have been told Wikimedia’s goal is sharing educational knowledge freely, with a sense of neutrality and balance. When an admin deletes unfamiliar work, he ensures everyone’s “knowledge” is limited to his own. The boundaries of “knowledge” will consequently remain very small in such a system. If Wikimedia Commons maintains such practices, it is unlikely to gain relevance beyond its own limited circle of users, which will consequently remain small.

This is not a personal critique, any more than the deletion of my user page was personal. I know it was not. I am mostly concerned with the microculture in which this occurred. If another Wikimedian hadn’t been corresponding with me already, no one would have reinstated my user page. No one would have noticed its deletion in the first place. Few artists have a supporter behind the Wiki-wall to help them in such circumstances. No “content creator” should need an insider to correct such problems. Wikimedia shouldn’t be an insider system; we have Hollywood for that.

Finally, my work was under suspicion because it looked “commercial.” The admin suspected I didn’t really have my own permission to upload my works under a CC-SA license. Finding that “Internalization of the Permission Culture” here of all places is disappointing. (“Commercial” shouldn’t be a consideration anyway. Much relevant/educational culture is commercial: movies, books, science, music, software, engineering, etc. Textbooks and academic journals are notoriously commercial. In fact, “non-commercial” licenses are not allowed on Wikimedia Commons. So “commercial” should not be a criterion here.) The admin’s judgement also exemplifies a bias within and outside the Free Culture movement: if it doesn’t look “amateur”, it can’t be Free. Open licenses (particularly CC licenses) are becoming a brand for “amateurs and hippies.” Professional artists may eschew such licenses for the stigma alone. The Free Culture movement should be working to expand popular perceptions of what free can be, and reaching out to accomplished professional creators. What happened here is the opposite.

EPILOGUE:
July 24, 2009
After reading Scott’s articles, and reviewing my own, I conclude: Wikimedia IS a Gatekeeper System and an Insider System. The only difference is Wikimedia gatekeepers are software nerds*, whereas proprietary culture industry gatekeepers are “money people” – investors and their trusted servants.

The question is, who do we want guarding the gates of our culture? Investors or nerds? They behave remarkably similarly. Corporate gatekeepers may claim they’re doing their jobs for money, but I suspect they really do it for the sheer thrill of gatekeeping, just as the unpaid Wikimedians do. Gatekeeping must be hella fun.

I still dream of world in which there are no gates to be guarded. That is the dream of Free Culture. Fortunately, Free Culture is bigger than Wikimedia. People will find ways to access and share knowledge outside of that system. I dream.

As long as I’m cooperating with commercial gatekeepers (professional distributors and publishers), I will cooperate with the nerd gatekeepers too. My work flows around the gates, but it can flow through them too. It’s just not as inspiring.

____
*Nerd is not a pejorative in my lexicon. I was raised nerd by nerds. I love nerds. But I hate gatekeepers.

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

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 [...]]]> 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!

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

YouTube vs. Kevin B. Lee

“When the history of intellectual property law is written, January 12, 2009 should be marked as a decisive moment. It was the day that my friend, fellow House Next Door contributor and sometime filmmaking partner Kevin B. [...]]]> Alienating film critics seems like a very bad move for Hollywood, but that’s not stopping them:

YouTube vs. Kevin B. Lee

“When the history of intellectual property law is written, January 12, 2009 should be marked as a decisive moment. It was the day that my friend, fellow House Next Door contributor and sometime filmmaking partner Kevin B. Lee saw his entire archive of critical video essays deleted by YouTube on grounds that his work violated copyright.” more…