Animator. Director. Artist. Scapegoat.
They pay attention.
Attention being the most valuable, and most limited, resource there is for humans. It’s more limited than money; you can’t just print more. People don’t “consume” art, they attend to it.
Meanwhile, here’s a little thing on Sita’s distribution model in the Wall Street Journal.
“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?
Sometimes I’m asked if I have any “advice” for the young’uns. I seem to give a different answer every time. Today’s answer is:
ADVICE:
Stop taking advice and stop asking for it.
The world is unlimited! There are a zillion ways to do things. Don’t be afraid of doing things wrong. The only way we make progress is from trying things, and that means a lot of failure. I’ve been helped by other peoples’ failures – they show me what not to do, so I can learn from their mistakes – and I hope my failures help other people succeed too. So even failure is a social contribution, as long as you’re failing YOUR way. An authentic failure is worth 100 insincere successes.
Do it YOUR way, not my way.
Looking to others to tell you what to do and how to do it is a bad habit. You can learn a lot just by observing. Let your observations be your teachers. What people SAY is not the same as what they DO, so pay attention to what they DO and learn from that.
If there’s something you can’t learn from observing, do some research. If research still doesn’t answer your question, THEN ask for advice. If you go straight to asking for advice, and expecting your answers there, you will miss out on all kinds of observations and learning.
That is my advice.
“The Internet means there’s no one to kill your dream. You can just do it. You don’t have to persuade anyone or get credentialed or even think about what others think of your idea.”
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.
Chris Carlson of Diamond Time sends this news:
“we are all approved across the boards with the exception of Memory
Lane Music, who only have a small piece of the song, Mean to Me.”
It will take many months to actually get the contracts from them, and I still need to raise about $45,000 to pay for this limited permission, but films are customarily released right after approvals; Sita Sings the Blues is more or less decriminalized at this point. So it’s time to release her! I have to update the credits and sound designer Greg Sextro is doing some final tweaking of the audio, but we’re hoping to have the film online and free under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License in about a month.
There’s a ton of work that needs to be done: web design, database set-ups, scanning documents, ideally having some ancillary products ready to go (who wants to make open-source merch? talk to us!), an automated system to give credits to donors….much more work than I can do alone. We’re trying to build a new model for film distribution, one that respects the audience and rewards sharing and freedom. Want to help? Please come to QuestionCopyright.org’s open meeting this Monday February 2 at the Software Freedom Law Center in New York.
See also: Sita’s Distribution Plan.