TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

‘Sita’ sings the copyright blues

By Chris Meadows

Note: I’ll be having surgery on my leg tomorrow, so this will probably be the last article you will see from me for a few days while I recover. I can be reached via Twitter or e-mail while in the hospital.

Sita Sings the Blues is an amazing animated feature created by Nina Paley. I first heard it mentioned in the #toc Twitter stream when it was discussed at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. It is a brilliant work of art, but the story behind it makes some important points about the nature of copyright law and how it affects ordinary people as well as creative artists.

The movie itself is touted as “the greatest breakup story ever told.” It is based on an ancient Hindu epic called the Ramayana, about the journey of Rama (an avatar of the god Vishnu) to find his kidnapped wife Sita (an avatara of the goddess Lakshmi), and what happened to them afterward.

The story is told through several different animation styles, and melds four levels of narrative: a shadow puppet “Greek chorus” discussing the story, Rama and Sita interacting through dialogue, Sita’s musical numbers using music from the 1920s and 30s singer Annette Hanshaw, and an autobiographical segment about Nina Paley’s own painful breakup experience. Each of these is animated in a different style, with different narrative methods to tie it together.

This split narrative makes Sita fascinatingly different from most other animated features. While it may be a touch confusing at first to those used to more straightforward features, once it is clear what is going on it makes the story work much more effectively than a single narrative could.

Particularly amusing is the discussion of the shadow puppets, which was unscripted dialogue that came out of Paley getting three of her south-Asian friends (two men and one woman) together to discuss what they remembered of the story. The nature of their recollections and kibitzing will be familiar to anyone who has ever discussed a favorite movie or book with friends and pondered why characters did something stupid (for instance, “Why did everyone forget about Shmi Skywalker at the end of The Phantom Menace?”) instead of the sensible thing.

The movie is now available for view in either streaming or high-resolution downloaded formats. A DVD-video format is forthcoming. The movie is released under a Creative Commons license, except for the Annette Hanshaw songs featured within it. And that is where the copyright problem arises.

Copywrong

According to Wikipedia (citing Annette Hanshaw’s own legal research recounted in a Youtube video interview), the recordings of the songs that were used were in the public domain, not having been renewed after their original 28-year copyright term expired.

However, the copyrights on the compositions were renewed—and because they came after the 1923 cut-off date locked in by copyright term extension, the compositions were still under copyright. Paley went ahead and made the film anyway, assuming that a licensing deal could be worked out with the rights-holders—after all, this was a small, independent film; it would not be making much money. How much could they want?

The answer, it turned out, was $220,000. The irony is that, since the recordings are in the public domain, Hanshaw could release them on an album or mix tape with no problem. She could even cover them herself if she liked—sound recordings are regulated by compulsory licensing, and for releasing a cover of the song, she would only have to pay pennies per song per copy sold.

The Un-Sync-able Nina Paley

But featuring them in a movie involves video “sync rights,” for which the rights-holders are entitled to charge as much as they like. As Paley says in an interview:

"It’s not Hanshaw’s estate, it’s not even the issue of her voice. It’s the compositions, which all belong to the big corporations right now. They’ve all been traded. None of the money [that Paley needs to pay to distribute Sita] is going to the artists. The only time that the companies go after you is if you’re making money. At the time that I wanted a distributor, I went to the companies to clear it, and they wanted $20K-26K per song. Plus an additional cost for a festival license."

"I don’t want a distributor anymore," says the animator.

Paley has managed to talk the rights-holders down to a $50,000 one-time payment, for which she will be allowed to release the film for free on the Internet, and sell up to 4,999 DVD copies (an additional level of payment kicks in at 5,000).

And so she is. The film can be downloaded or BitTorrented from a number of different sites, and she is in the process of having it mastered for DVD. But that does not mean Paley cannot make money off of the film in other ways; her site has a store page through which she will sell 35mm film prints, HDcam tapes, and even a 320-gig hard drive containing every possible version of the film (including the 200-gig high-definition master). She will also take in donations through her website, speaking fees, and make money from 35mm rentals of the film by distributors for screenings. Certainly, she deserves to. She spent several years and a great deal of money to make the film.

Copyright for Commoners

And this is where the copyright problem for the common person comes in. As Paley says in the YouTube video linked above, she had to go to the EFF (who in turn put her in touch with some student lawyers) for research on the copyright status of the songs. What chance would any ordinary person have who wanted to find that out?

For instance, after seeing Sita Sings the Blues I became interested in Annette Hanshaw, and looked around to find some of her recordings. I found quite a few available for download at the Internet Archive, as well as in various BitTorrent streams.

I also found some websites with biographical information and discographies about Hanshaw, and in correspondence with the webmaster of one of those sites happened to mention the public domain recordings. The webmaster responded:

These recordings are NOT in PD regardless of how someone carelessly labels as such on the Internet!

To quote a very knowledgeable friend on the Sita copyright subject:
“(a) the songs ARE still legally protected and (b) sound recordings ARE still under copyright in the US, and this is hardly a secret.”

I started to respond with a link to the information about the research Paley had done on their status—but then I realized it would just start a pointless argument. The webmaster believes his “very knowledgeable friend” while I have to trust that the research Paley (and the Internet Archive) did on their public domain status is accurate.

I couldn’t prove it to him based on “how someone carelessly labels as such on the Internet” any more than he could prove it to me based on the word of a nameless yet “knowledgeable” friend. We just have to agree to disagree; it’s not worth arguing over.

And this is the position any ordinary person who wants to make a use of some ostensibly public-domain work (made after the 1923 cut-off date) is placed in: trusting that whoever did the research to claim it is in the public domain was correct. It is a twin dilemma with the issue of who can grant clearance for use of “orphaned works”—even the works that are supposedly free from copyright might not be. And, as the travails of Nina Paley point out, even if the recordings are free, other copyright aspects might not be.

A Creative Dilemma

Paley’s story has had a more-or-less happy ending. The film has been released, garnered great critical acclaim, and is now free to see. But the trouble Paley went through to get the rights to release it point out how much of a restriction on present-day creativity that copyright of long-forgotten cultural artifacts can be.

As Paley points out, original music would not have worked thematically in her movie.

The songs themselves inspired the film. There would be no film without those songs. Until I heard them, the Ramayana was just another ancient Indian epic to me. I was feebly connecting this ancient epic to my own experiences in 2002. But the Hanshaw songs were a revelation: Sita’s story has been told a million times not just in India, not just through the Ramayana, but also through American Blues.

Almost nobody even remembers who Annette Hanshaw is in the present day. I thought I was fairly well-versed on jazz artists, but even I had never heard of her until I saw Sita Sings the Blues. Without Sita, that ignorance would have continued. Thanks to Paley’s film, Hanshaw’s music will be exposed to new generations who would never even have known about her without it.

And this new exposure was almost prevented by the greed of corporate dogs in the manger who had nothing to do with the creation or propagation of the music beyond happening to acquire it over decades of business. (Paley has said that, as an artist, she has never actually benefited from copyright herself.)

Thankfully, that didn’t happen, and the movie is out now. But Paley had to take out a $50,000 loan on top of everything else she had already spent on the movie to make it possible. Therefore, I highly encourage every TeleReader to watch the film—and if you like it, kick in a few bucks via Google Checkout (preferred) or PayPal via Paley’s donation page. Sita Sings the Blues is worthy of support.