Storybook by Paola van Turennout (not me!) of everytales.com.
Category: copyleft
Help the University of Illinois Library Help “Nina’s Adventures”
They need $7,000 to scan, prep, and upload my entire comics oeuvre, including Nina’s Adventures and Fluff. Under a Creative Commons Share Alike license, of course, so everyone can see, share, use, and build on them.
$7,000 for Digital Content Creation to digitize a collection of the original comic strip art boards of Nina Paley, an Urbana-born cartoonist and animated filmmaker, whose award-winning animated film Sita Sings the Blues was reviewed by Roger Ebert as “astonishingly original” and selected by him for screening at Ebertfest 2009 in Champaign.
Her cartoon series include Nina’s Adventures (self-syndicated) and Fluff (distributed internationally by Universal Press Syndicate). Nina’s Adventures was a semi-autobiographical, often experimental, alternative weekly comic strip that delivered incisive commentary on consumerism, overpopulation, and other social issues. Ms. Paley is interested in making her artwork openly and freely available for distribution and reuse.
If interested please call the Library: (217) 333-5683
Free as in Phreedom
Cultural value is related to monetary value, but they are not synonymous. Just as air has more value when it circulates freely, culture is more valuable when it is shared.
Consider the value of language (which is culture). The more people use any particular language, the more valuable it becomes. A scarce language is far less valuable than a common one like English. The more people speak English, the more desirable English becomes; the more songs, books, films, and other communications are produced in English. The value of a language comes from those who use it.
But suppose we commodify language. I’ll start. Let’s say I’m granted a monopoly on the letter “F”. I could have patented a big letter like “E” (12.702% frequency) or “T” (9.056%), but my aspirations are modest. At 2.228%, “F” is below average frequency, so it shouldn’t be any major hardship if I start collecting a royalty of, say, 20 cents per use. Even a pauper can afford $.20 to splurge on an “F” from time to time. And they will! Because you can’t spell “FUN” without “F.” Not to mention “FREEDOM”.
(Since my permission is required for any use of “F,” I won’t permit its degradation in uses I don’t approve of. That word that ends in “uck,” for example. That won’t be allowed under any circumstances, to protect the integrity, quality and reputation of my letter.)
Assigning monetary value to an intangible is the first step towards having its real value recognized. All those other, un-patented letters suddenly seem worthless in comparison. How valuable can “A” (8.167%) be, after all, when you can get it for free? “F” is clearly worth more, or I wouldn’t have invested in privatizing it.
Yet in spite of its clear monetary value, my letter seems to be showing up less and less phrequently. Gradually people adopt cheap phakes instead oph the real thing. They phind a way to spell “PHREEDOM” without paying me.
Soon, the letter “eph” is so scarce, no one recognizes it. Like Avestan, Elbasan, Old Uyghur, and the Dodo, “eph” goes extinct.
And that is the dipherence between cultural value and monetary value.
Ravana enjoys some Free Culture
A giant sculpture of Ravana from Sita Sings the Blues showed up at “World Laughter Day” in Hyderabad. Photo by Krishnendu Halder. Thanks to Lev for the tip!
Update: Jym found this story about the Ravana “Recession Monster.”
RiP: a Remix Manifesto
RiP: a Remix Manifesto is a fun, accessible introduction to “Intellectual Property.” Below is one of my favorite sections, showing how culture is more than just songs and images.
Of course it’s open source, so go watch the whole thing – or remix it.
Back from Nerd Central
And crazy busy. Chicago and Urbana and Ebertfest were great, amazing, beyond my ability to emotionally comprehend, I’ve never had a week like that before. Then to top it off, Sita won Best Narrative Feature at the Indian Film festival of Los Angeles, and moved to #1 on Critical Consensus. That’s just nuts.
Anyway, it was great being back in Urbana, my hometown, where nerds are made as well as born. I was raised nerd, by nerds, and it’s only a fluke that I appear to be an artist; my heart belongs to nerd-dom. Want proof? Here I am visiting family friend, genius, and art-supporter Theo Gray at Wolfram Research:
My Free Culture activism is nerdy too, inspired as it is by the Free Software movement. Theo doesn’t like it, and made fiercely pro-copyright arguments as only a proprietary software nerd can.
For contrast, here’s a picture of me with Richard Stallman in New York:
Whose side am I on, anyway? The side of NERDS!