… with a side-dish of irony.
About a week ago I posted a video by Nina Paley. That discovery led me to her website / blog. Her pet cause is the madness of current intellectual property laws – so she immediately won a place in my heart. A notable quote:
“What do religious fundamentalists and big media corporations have in common? They believe that they own culture.” – Nina Paley.
Her interest in and advocacy for alternatives to the copyright regimen we all suffer under arose because she made a professional feature-length movie by herself over a period of years, only to essentially be blocked by the fact that the movie relied on still-copyrighted music from the 1930s that she’d perhaps assumed was public domain. The movie itself is awesome. It’s called Sita Sings the Blues – you can get the full story at her relevant posts on her blog.
Her attention has lately turned to a reconceptualization of copyright that I find much more compelling than the fairly established “copyleft” associated with the free software movement: she calls it “♡copyheart.” It’s cool. I may even put a ♡copyheart at the bottom of my blog at some point.
Nobody owns culture. She made a song called “Copying is not theft.”
Actually, although I thought Paley did an artistic and masterful job with her sequences involving the 1930s music by jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, those weren’t my favorite tracks from the movie. My favorite musical track and video sequence was the part called “Agni Pariksha (Sita’s Fire),” which is accompanied by a song by Todd Michaelsen, sung by Reena Shah. It took me more than a little bit of googling to figure that out – it wasn’t immediately transparent on her various websites.
Here’s the thing – the irony, if you will: I decided I liked that Todd Michaelsen song enough that I “wanted” it. I sort of assumed that, given it was part of this copyheart-advocating artist, that I’d surely find it downloadable, somewhere, But I didn’t. Really, I didn’t. When I went to use one of the free youtube-to-mp3 conversion utilities, to “capture” the audio stream from the youtube video, I got this message:
Google doesn’t block the youtube copywidgets unless it’s getting takedown pressure from the copyright holder in question – this means that Todd Michaelsen or someone connected to him is specifically not allowing youtube users full access to the work.
That’s the irony – that the one song in Paley’s work that I decided I wanted, I couldn’t get. Paying for Michaelsen’s song was literally not an option – because of my nefarious South Korean IP address, getting the credit card checkout widget to work on US-based websites is sometimes unreliable, because US banking websites shove South Korean IP addresses into a “probably evil fraudsters” bucket along with most other “Asian-except-Japan” addresses; either that, or they force you to a Korean-language- and Korean-bank based site that then requires a Korean credit card. What’s often impossible is using a US credit card on a US site from South Korea. I really did intend to buy his “soundtrack” to Sita Sings the Blues.
Of course, I’m technically savvy enough that using other means to capture the song stream in question was pretty trivial. But still. I’m just sayin’.
What I’m listening to right now.
Todd Michaelson, Reena Shah, Laxmi Shah, “Agni Pariksha.”
