Blog: http://blog.ninapaley.com

Sita Sings the Blues: http://www.sitasingstheblues.com

Benson: Copyright Chat is a podcast dedicated to discussing important copyright matters. Host, Sara Benson, the Copyright Librarian from the University of Illinois, converses with experts from across the globe to engage the public with rights issues that are relevant to their daily lives.

Welcome to Copyright Chat. We have Nina Paley with us today in studio. Nina Paley is an American cartoonist and animator. She directed the animated feature film, Sita Sings the Blues. Because of obstacles in clearing the sync rights for the music recordings in Sita Sings the Blues, Paley took an active part in the free culture movement. She is an artist-in-residence at the QuestionCopyright.org nonprofit organization. In 2012, she was a special guest in the international conference CopyCamp in Warsaw, and she won the Public Knowledge Organization’s IP3 award in 2010 for her work in intellectual property. Welcome.

Paley: Thank you.

Benson: And great to have you here, and you are living in balmy Urbana.

Paley: It’s balmy now. It’s like 33 degrees today.

Benson: I know. This is balmy. It was negative 12 the other day. So welcome, and you have a really interesting story because you didn’t come into copyright the same way I did, from a fascination with copyright laws and all that. Why don’t you tell us how it came to be that you became a copyright advocate?

Paley: Well, I had always believed in copyright as a young person drawing things. When my stuff first got published, any well-meaning older person would tell me about how important copyright is and how valuable my intellectual property is and how I must protect it. Intellectual property, Intellectual property. And it was very exciting to think that I was making property. Some valuable thing that was worth big bucks, you know, that people would trade and fight over. I never really thought what intellectual property meant or how that word came into use. I just thought, ooh, this is my property, I’m making properties. So I was groomed into it like everybody else, and for years, I just thought copyright helps me, I’m a professional artist. Yay, copyright, and I didn’t question it until Sita Sings the Blues came along. It wasn’t when I released Sita Sings the Blues. It was when I started making Sita Sings the Blues because I knew that this historical music I was using was crucial. It was crucial to the point of the film, and when I talked to experts about it, they pretty much universally said, just don’t use that music, just don’t use old music, independent filmmakers can’t use old music, it’s a mess, just get new music, don’t bother. And I mean, at first, I was like, oh, I can’t use the music and tried some other way, but it was like, I was making a film based on what my muse was telling me to do, basically, and my muse doesn’t respect copyright. It was, I was not inspired by it. How can I be inspired by something that I have to make myself to simulate something. These were authentic songs from an authentic historical period that carried important meaning and made a point to the film. So I decided I was just going to use this music, and let the chips fall where they may. I did contact the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and they put me in touch with American University, the Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic, and I worked with them, at least figuring out the provenance of the song, songs. They worked very hard to try to figure out who owns what, and, of course, every song was owned by multiple corporations, weird percentages depending on what territory you were in.

But I still, even then, making the film, I still thought, well, this is a pain, and it’s silly, and copyright lasts too long.

But I still didn’t question fundamentally copyright. I just thought it lasts too long, and then when I was trying to release the film and goi