Copyright is Brain Damage: Nina Paley at TEDxMaastricht (Full Transcript)

They arbitrarily set how much they want and they don’t have to license it anyway. You can offer millions of dollars, and if they don’t feel like it, they are under no obligation to license works.

If you don’t get the permission, then what they do is they legally can censor a movie, and this happens all the time. That doesn’t actually make them money. I also realized it wasn’t making artists’ money. The artists that made the music that was in “Sita Sings the Blues” (the copyrighted music), they were all dead.

But before they were dead they had signed their copyrights to the companies that were making the songs. Now they’re down to like five global media conglomerates that control all this old music. And, these rights are basically abstract financial tools that are traded between corporations.

So, a single song by Annette Hanshaw from the 20s is broken into percentages and those percentages are owned by multiple corporations. This does not actually benefit artists. It doesn’t benefit the works in question and it doesn’t benefit the public.

So I had to ask myself how much was copyright actually benefiting me and I took a look at my career which had been in comics up to that point. I realized actually I wasn’t really making money from copyright. What copyright was doing was blocking the circulation of my comics, which is probably why most of you haven’t seen my comics.

And by the time I was making “Sita Sings the Blues”, Annette Hanshaw’s music was basically unheard. The only copies of Annette Hanshaw’s music that were in circulation were by old record collectors who were sharing copies illegally. Beyond that, you could not hear Annette Hanshaw’s song anymore.

So, at this point, I could talk about copyright reform. We could shorten copyright terms, we could add responsibilities to monopoly rights. If intellectual property is really property we could tax it, like property. And there are plenty of copyright reformers who focus on these issues.

But my life is too short to focus on legislation when I could be making art. So I’m not a copyright reformer. I am a copyright abolitionist. Now, you might be wondering if life is too short to reform copyright, isn’t it too short by abolish copyright?

What I mean to abolish copyright is my own mind. I can do that right now, and so can you. We are information transmitters. Information enters through our senses like our eyes and our ears. It exits through our expressions, like our voices, our writings, or drawings. And all this information going through us creates a living phenomenon called Culture.

In order for Culture to stay alive we have to be open transmitting and receiving information. I depicted a culture moving in a line here. But really it’s a network, like a neural network. And we are neurons in a great mind. In an individual mind information flows from neuron to neuron and that creates a bigger phenomenon called Thought. And that creates a bigger phenomenon called Mind.

In the Great Mind, information moves from human to human. And that creates a greater phenomenon called Art. And that creates a greater phenomenon called Culture.

There are single artists that work alone. In fact, I’m one of therm. I work alone. But the Art that these individual artists transmit contains all sorts of information that they first received from Culture. This might be language, symbols, aesthetics, references of all kinds. And this information has to flow between humans for Art to exist. Just as information has to flow between neurons for Thought to exist. It’s through this flow that culture stays alive and we stay connected to each other.

Ideas can flow in and they flow out, and they change little as they go along and that’s called innovation or progress. But thanks to copyright we live in a regime where some information can go in but it can’t come out.

And I often hear people engaged in creator pursuits ask “am I allowed to use this?, I don’t want to get in trouble.” Trouble may include lawsuits, fines and even jail. And it’s the threat of trouble that is dictating our choices about what we express.

Copyright activates our internal censors. Internal censorship is the enemy of creativity because it halts expression before it can even begin. If you’re asking “am I allowed to use this?” you may have surrendered your internal authority to lawyers, legislators and corporations.

Whenever we censor our expression we close a little more and information flows a little less. The less information flows, the more it stagnates. Evolution, progress and innovation stall. And this is what we call “permission culture”.

When you shut down neurons to prevent them from transmitting signals we call that “brain damage”. Copyright is brain damage. It’s brain damage in the great mind, and it’s brain damage in the individual mind.

But it’s the individual mind, specifically my mind, that I can do something about. Now I’ve asked myself did I ever consent to letting permission culture into my brain. And why am I complying with censorship, and how much choice do I really have about what information goes in and comes out of me.

And the answer is I have some control; I can choose to expose myself to mainstream media for example, I can choose what kind of information to pass along to a certain extent. But, to be in the world and to be open means all kinds of information is going to come in. And I don’t get to choose what goes in based on its copyright status.

And in fact, the most proprietary images and sounds are the ones that are most aggressively rammed into our heads. For example, “Have a holy, jolly Christmas, it’s the best time of the year I don’t know, if there’ll be snow but have a cup of cheer” Hey! I hate Christmas music. But, because I live in the United States and have to leave the house even in the months of November and December I can’t not listen to it. It goes right into my ears and into my brain and it plays over and over again.

Here are some of the corporations that I could get in trouble with [CBS. UNIVERSAL, DREAMWORKS, VIACOM] for showing and singing that little clip here in the slideshow. They did not consult me when I was a child and they were ramming this into my head. So I did not ask them permission to put it in my slideshow.

Thank you.

Now copyright is automatic and there’s no way to opt out. But you can add a license, an alternative license that restores some of the permissions copyright automatically takes away. But the same threat of violence is behind alternative licenses also. Licenses actually reinforce the mechanism of copyright. Everyone still needs to seek permission. They just get it a little more often.

And licenses have the unfortunate effect of encouraging people to pay even more attention to copyright which gives even more authority to that inner censor. And who let that censor into our heads in the first place? So although I use free licenses and would appreciate meaningful copyright reform, licenses and laws are not the solution. The solution is more and more people just ignoring copyright. And I want to be one of those people.

Some years ago I declared sovereignty over my own head. Freedom of speech begins at home. Censorship and troubles still exist outside my head. And that’s where I want them to stay: outside my head.

I’m not going to assist bad laws and corporations by setting an outpost for them in my own mind. I no longer favor or reject works based on their copyright status. Because ideas are not good or bad based on what licenses people slap on them.

I want to be a free woman, and a free artist. And the only way I can do that is by ignoring copyright. But I’ve been indoctrinated by decades of permission culture. So, for me, ignoring copyright takes discipline and courage. For example, my new feature film that I’m working on, “Seder-Masochism” is a personal challenge to ignore copyright completely.

At first it was really difficult because like most of us I self-censored without even noticing. The first time I heard Louis Armstrong’s song “Go down Moses”, first thought I had was “Oh, that’s great” and then immediately followed by “I can’t possibly use that”. But because I had primed to myself to notice these acts of self-censorship and resist them, I did not actually shut it out of my mind instantly which would have happened otherwise.

So the result of me not shutting out of my mind instantly ultimately was this. [Videoclip:] Pharaoh, Pharaoh, let my people go. [Music: Go down Moses]

Thanks.

So it took some mental retraining but soon a whole world of culture opened up to me and I could create freely. Now, I don’t know if I’m fully up to the task because, I can say I’m crippled by decades of permission culture indoctrination. But small acts of ignoring copyright go a long way.

Now, you might be wondering what am I going to do with this feature film when it’s done. First, I have to finish the feature film that’s going to take probably two more years, two down, two to go.

And then I’m going to release a legal version with all of the copyrighted material redacted and replaced with directors’ commentary.  And that version is going to suck. It’s going to be obviously and hopelessly degraded by copyright censorship. But the inevitable undamaged copies circulating illegally on sharing sites will be obviously superior. And this I hope, will encourage people to engage with culture beyond copyright law because there is a beautiful world of culture out there and inside your own mind.

By ignoring copyright we can heal our collective brain damage. I hope you join me and make it art and not law. And with this I will leave you with a scene from “Seder-Masochism”. This is going to be the last scene in the movie. It’s the first one I animated and it began with a simple act of ignoring copyright.

[Music: This Land Is Mine by Andy Williams]

Resources for Further Reading:

7 Ways to Make a Conversation With Anyone by Malavika Varadan (Transcript)

The Secret of Becoming Mentally Strong by Amy Morin (Full Transcript)

Denzel Washington: Put God First Speech (Full Transcript)

The prison of your mind by Sean Stephenson (Full Transcript)

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