There are a lot of concerning issues developing around copyright at the moment–ACTA, the Digital Economy Bill, the three strikes policy whack-a-mole in various countries, and more.
As part of its educational and advocacy work, QuestionCopyright.org is producing a series of 1 Minute Memes. These are the fine folks who helped Nina Paley in her struggle to clear the necessary rights to release her wonderful film, “Sita Sings the Blues”.
Not surprisingly, the first video in the series is a new animation by Nina. However, the work is incomplete and in the same free-to-share spirit with which Nina released “Sita”, she and QuestionCopyright.org are asking for your help.
The placeholder video really needs a kick ass musical track. You can see the lyrics and the draft video on its home page. The high resolution version of the video is being hosted at the Internet Archive and is being shared under a CC-BY-SA license, so you are free to go beyond just adding the music, if you like, as long as you maintain attribution and share your changes under the same license. You are even free to make some money of your remix if you want.
Via Cory at Boing Boing.
Glad you picked this up — I’m really excited about what can happen with these Minute Memes. Note this is just the first of a projected twelve, each on a different topic related to copyright reform: http://questioncopyright.org/minute_memes has more.
By the way, we weren’t able to help Nina Paley all that much in her struggle to clear the rights to the 80-year-old songs used in her film. Nina negotiated the monopolists down herself — we just interviewed her about her experience (http://questioncopyright.org/nina_paley_sita_interview). Later, she became Artist-in-Residence at QuestionCopyright.org, but she was not at the time of the interview.
You certainly helped draw attention to her struggle to clear the songs. That had to have a positive impact on the number of folks, myself included, who donated to help her recover that cost.
It was clear from Cory’s post and the intro on this first video’s page that it is part of series. Thanks for the clarification, though, and the link to the page for the entire series.