I’m reposting this (originally posted July 2009) for a third time, because misinformation continues to spread all over the interwebs. I should post it more often.
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
Three times?! Maybe next time you can start compiling a list of these silly people so we can go to their sites and mock them 🙂
People just can’t imagine giving something away voluntarily. They assume there has to be some force somewhere.
Happy Public Domain day! Amongst other things, The Great Gatsby is now public domain!
Hey Nina!
I had written about your film in one of my posts for an Indian blogging site called Passion for cinema.And i too had the same misconception as others, and you had corrected it.Though I couldn’t change it in the post which is already online, I’ve changed it in the version that I’m submitting as an essay for college.would like to send it to you, except that I don’t know what your mail id is..(?)
In all of this I forgot to say, that I completely loved the film!! Was very charming. 🙂