feminist blogs

From the LA Times:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton won praise in June after pushing to extend many federal benefits traditionally provided to diplomats’ spouses to gay and lesbian partners.

Since then, unmarried heterosexual couples have been lining up to ask for benefits too. They have approached the State Department’s personnel office and the diplomats’ union, arguing that they are entitled to equal treatment. At least one couple has threatened to challenge the rules in court as discriminatory.

The U.S. Office of Personnel Management, which is responsible for policy on federal workers, is weighing such an extension of benefits, U.S. officials say — to the consternation of conservatives.

This is predictable. If same sex couples cannot marry, then “marriage-light” policies have to be created for same-sex couples. But why should “marriage-light” policies exclude heterosexual couples?

Marriage laws, fundamentally, are how we turn someone unrelated to us, into our legally recognized closest relative in the world. I don’t think that purpose is undermined by opening marriage lite provisions to straight couples.¹ However, there’s no doubt that conservatives who oppose equality for gay people do see marriage lite laws as diluting marriage, which makes it ironic that their actions make the continued growth of marriage lite arrangements inevitable.

In somewhat related news, the DC group Full Equality Now! has walked back its initial opposition to anti-gay ads on public buses (which they now say was just a draft), after the Gay and Lesbian Activists Alliance and the ACLU stood up for the free speech rights of anti-gay groups. Good for GLAA and the ACLU, and good for FEN! for being willing to back off their mistake (even if they did it a little ungracefully).

Hat tips to Marriage Debate.

1. Although I can see a disadvantage to having a multiplicity of marriage and marriage-lite laws; the more such laws there are, the less they will be universally understood, which makes them less useful.

[This post is reprinted from Attempts, a blog I read and highly recommend. (Those "Alas" readers who aren't interested in comics may still want to check out "Attempts" for posts like this one about Roman Polanski).

[Thanks to Stephen Frug for his kind permission to repost this on "Alas." --Amp]

* * *

Thoughts on the copyright reclamation by the heirs of Jack Kirby, sparked by this post by Alan David Duane.

(In reading the below, remember I’m neither a lawyer nor a policymaker nor even one who has read the relevant legal documents; I’m going by a (semi-informed, but distinctly) layman’s readings of the news stories about them. If that doesn’t interest you, bail now.)

1)

The heirs of Jack Kirby have filed a notice of copyright reclamation in the case of superheroes he had a hand in creating for Marvel in the early 1960’s, characters such as the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and even Spiderman (who was created by Steve Ditko more than Jack Kirby).

2)

It’s important to remember what’s going on here. Kirby’s heirs aren’t suing anyone — at least not yet. They are filing a notice of reclamation. They are able to do this because of the odd nature of our current lengthy copyright system.

Until 1976, copyrights were good for 56 years — an automatic 28 with a single optional renewal. In 1976, Congress extended that period — first to 75 and then later to 95 years (oversimplifying but in essence). This was not only prospective, applying to works copyrighted in 1976 and later, but retroactive, applying to old works too.

But this created an odd situation for those who had sold their copyrights prior to 1976. What they’d sold was copyright as it existed then, i.e. the 56 year term. What to do about the extensions for sold copyrights? Should they belong to the original owner (on the grounds that they only sold the existing copyright of 56 years and not any more), or should they belong to the new purchaser (on the grounds that the purchaser bought the copyright and the extension doesn’t affect that)?

(Note that this is also a different legal situation than the one involving DC/Superman/Jerry Siegel’s heirs.)

3)

This entire debate is distorted by a broader misconception in our culture about the relation of worth and wealth to merit and effort.

It is a strong cultural myth in our society — an essential undergirding of one of the two major political philosophies of this country, and an almost-as-important one for the other — that people who get rich deserved it. They worked hard, or had a good idea, and therefore they made it. Conservatives tend to (implicitly) assume this is the end of the story: if you work hard and/or are smart, you’ll get rich; if you’re poor, it’s your own damn fault. Liberals, in contrast, recognize unfairness and randomness to a degree, so they tend to say that people can work hard and stay poor. But neither side tends to see the fact that wealth is at least a much a matter of chance and luck as it is of merit or effort.

The reason we don’t like to see that, of course, is that it upends the supporting intellectual assumptions of most of our society: if the rich are simply lucky, then the enormous favor they receive is unearned and unfair.¹

This is never more true than when we are talking about intellectual property.

I’m not (repeat, not) saying that artistic merit has no relation to how well a work does. But it’s been extensively argued on theoretical grounds, amply seen throughout history and shown in controlled laboratory studies that merit is, at best, a necessary but not sufficient factor. Harry Potter may have been a good series of children’s books — but there are a lot of other books that are equally good (as I’ve had children’s librarians say to me); J. K. Rowling may have been good, but she was mostly very, very lucky.

However true this is of the success of original works, how much more strongly true is it of intellectual properties² which have success in derivative works!

This distorts our discussion in numerous ways. In part it leads to people saying things like

I won’t argue with anyone who tells me Herb Trimpe is unlikely to return to Marvel and create a blockbuster, breakthrough character that generates millions of dollars, no matter what sort of compensation deal is in place.

…which implies that the talent and effort of Herb Trimpe (who was the first man to draw (although he did not create) Wolverine) was a major role in Wolverine’s becoming a breakthrough character. This is not because of what Herb Trimpe did or didn’t do.³ It’s because time and chance — and broad social forces such as create a market for characters such as Wolverine — and, above all, fashion are what made Wolverine worth what he’s worth today.

The fight that will follow over the ownership of the Fantastic Four isn’t quite like a fight over a lottery ticket; but it’s far, far closer than anyone is granting in this discussion.

4)

There is a third party to every legal battle over intellectual property, one which has neither lawyers nor lobbyists on its side. Thanks to the recent intellectual growth of the copyleft movement, it has some advocates; but their position is largely based on reason and fairness and the public good, and is therefore extremely weak. But it is the most important party nonetheless.

I speak, of course, of the public.

Intellectual property — a misnomer, really, since there is no thing to be owned — is a government-enforced monopoly restricting freedom of speech. It restricts your ability to say what you want to say, in person or print or on film or in comics — if what you want to say is, for example, “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane; I was [REMAINDER DELETED DUE TO DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE]” It equally, and even more indefensibly, to your ability to tell an original story — if that story is about, for example, Superman or Spiderman.

There are reasons for so limiting speech — which is why the power to do so is explicitly granted in the Constitution — but given that it is limiting very basic human rights, the power is moral only insofar as it is necessary to accomplish its stated ends. (Whether or not it is legal is a separate matter.)

5)

The moral case for creators’ rights is both essential and irrelevant to the Kirby-copyright issue.

It’s irrelevant because neither party has a very good moral (as opposed to legal) claim. On one side we have Kirby’s biological heirs; on the other, the corporate descendants of the companies he worked for. Neither set of people had much to do with the effort or talent put into these characters; they are fighting for an inheritance, and like any fight for inheritance they are fighting for things they may have title to but don’t in any moral sense particularly deserve.

But it’s essential because it was only because of the (perceived) moral rights of creators that copyright was extended in the first place.

If the case before Congress had been that companies wished to extend their intellectual monopolies to make more money from them, then even that bribery-pliant group of sellouts would have a hard time justifying such a vote. So it was all talked up in terms of the struggling, lonely dreamer, hoping to turn his or her talent into a win for his or her heirs.

This was a fiction, of course — as much of a fiction as the notion that estate taxes hit small farmers rather than wealthy businessmen, and a fiction of the same kind, i.e. a propagandistic one designed to hide the true beneficiaries of public policy. But in terms of the copyright extensions passed in the 1970’s, and then again in the 1990’s, and then again whenever Mickey Mouse next threatens to go out of copyright, it’s an essential one. Without this fiction, the extra value that came from the copyright for years 57 - 95 of an intellectual property simply wouldn’t exist — or would, rather, be held by the public and not by anyone in particular.

This is why you can’t say of copyrights what you’d say of, for example, real estate. If you sell a house in a poor neighborhood, and then it becomes trendy, and the owner therefore (through luck) becomes rich, you can’t complain that you didn’t know its worth when you sold it. But no one seriously doubts (pragmatically if not morally) the perpetual property rights to real estate.⁴

Whereas the purchasers of these monopolies, which have become valuable only due to chance (and the efforts of thousands, morally and artistically indistinguishable from similar efforts which led nowhere), have any chance of extending them at the expense of the public only by appealing to the moral claim of their creators.

Marvel wants to argue that, for the good of people like Jack Kirby, it must have the right to hold a monopoly on his creations — against, in this case, his actual heirs. They need the appeal to Kirby’s rights to win the broader public debate, and need to squash that same appeal to win the narrow legal one.

The myth that wealth is earned is necessary to make us think that the financial windfall is significantly due to Kirby’s talent in the first place, and that this fight over a lottery ticket is a fight over who really deserves it — blinding us to the real answer, no one.

6)

Artists can’t threaten to withhold their next breakthrough character from big companies if they’re not fairly compensated, because they have almost no say in whether they can create one. They put their effort and talent into what they make; but what makes it valuable is fashion, and the efforts of others, and luck, and a host of other factors.

Companies have extended copyright based on a myth of the individual creator — who they are trying to screw over at every other moment so as to make money for themselves.

Of course artists should be fairly compensated for their work — and there is, as I have said, a very strong pragmatic argument for copyright, one I don’t disagree with (assuming that said copyright is, as provided by the U.S. constitution, “for limited terms”). But the vast wealth at stake here is irrelevant to that right, since it is all-but-irrelevant to that success.

And of course companies should be able to get funding to make (say) movies, and then profit from those endeavors. But they want more than that; they want to maintain a public monopoly on the ability to tell stories about certain characters who, for whatever reason, have caught the public’s imagination, so that not only can they make and profit from stories about their characters, but so that they can ensure that theirs are the only stories about those characters that are there to be told.

7)

Since I’m not a lawyer or policymaker, but simply a citizen with opinions on public policy, I can say that I support neither Kirby’s heirs nor DC/Marvel. I think that, 56 years after their creation, all works should be in the public domain. The supreme court, alas, disagrees – which seems to mean little more than their unwillingness to open the can of worms of recognizing that our current Congressional system is so poisoned by legalized bribery that no judgments of Congress (or the President, or really the Courts) can be understood as representing the public interest save incidentally. They said it was Congress’s call to make — which would have been a reasonable argument if Congress wasn’t bought and paid for by the stakeholders on one side of this particular issue.

But the Congress was bought and paid for, and the Court was unwilling to enforce the rights of the public. So what we are left with is a debate over who should get to steal from the public the winnings of a lottery.

8)

To anyone not convinced by all of the above:

I have one more argument for my position. It’s a knock-down, irrefutable, overwhelming argument, such that if you heard it you could not even begin to imagine disagreeing with me. It would, in fact, revolutionize your thinking on every aspect of this issue.

But since this set of concepts can, as it happens, only be expressed in metaphorical terms as an X-Men story, I’m not legally allowed to share it with you until the X-Men go into the public domain.

Until then, you’ll just have to trust me.

1. Incidentally, the consequence of this argument isn’t necessarily a socialist economy, which I wouldn’t actually favor; there are extremely strong pragmatic grounds for favoring the retention of a capitalist system and, as part of that, a robust set of property rights. It’s just that such a system should be supplemented by a far stronger redistributory state (in a tax-for-social-goods-sense) than is true of the U.S. today; and also (and this is almost as important) that the public culture and debate should recognize the preponderance of luck in the outcomes of economic lives.
2. What a vile phrase.
3. Although in fact I think that Wolverine’s blockbuster status has far more to do with Chris Claremont, and to a slightly lesser extent Frank Miller, than it does Herb Trimpe or Wolverine’s creators — although Claremont and Miller have even less legal claim than do Wolverine’s originators.
4. Except the bible, of course, which wanted everything reset to zero every fifty years to ensure justice (Leviticus 25:13). What socialist commie pinko wrote that, eh?

Cathy Young argues that our current copyright system isn’t working as originally intended:

My argument: copyright law as it currently exists does the opposite of its original intent (as formulated in the U.S. Constitution, which allows Congress to legislate on copyright, and in the very first copyright statute enacted in 1790): to promote arts and letters and encourage learning, by giving authors an incentive to create new works by ensuring that they can fairly profit from their writings. (In olden days, it wasn’t at all uncommon for unauthorized editions of books to be legally sold with no profits going to the writer.) Today, copyright violation claims are commonly invoked to suppress new works — whether it’s 60 Years Later, The Wind Done Gone (the “Gone With the Wind-from-a-slave’s-point-of-view” novel that was finally declared legal after much wrangling in the courts), a production of a James Joyce play, or fan-made Xena: Warrior Princess videos on YouTube.

I agree. But Cathy also writes:

Would it really be perfectly fine, from a libertarian point of view, if, after the huge success of the first Harry Potter book, Joe Smith or Mary Jones quickly popped out a sequel before J.K. Rowling could publish the second one?

Well, I’m not a libertarian. But why not?

I’d suggest that Smith and/or Jones should be legally required to pay Rowling some sort of licensing fee if their book has a print run over a thousand copies in a year; and that the front cover include a clear (”not written or authorized by J.K. Rowling”), so consumers aren’t deceived.

But with that in place, I don’t see what the problem is. Few if any Harry Potter fans would have said “oh, why even bother reading the Rowling versions when they come out, now that quick knock-offs are available,” so it’s not as if allowing the knock-offs would deprive Rowling of her ability to earn a living.

Meanwhile, forbidding Smith and Jones from publishing their Harry Potter knock-off might well deprive them of their ability to make a living as Harry Potter knock-off writers, and it arguably infringes on their freedom of speech.

I can already hear people saying: “Who cares? Smith and Jones don’t have an original thought in their head. They don’t have a right to other people’s speech.” But some artists work best by reimagining works they already love, rather than by creating “from scratch.”¹ Sometimes the result is a better work than the original — think of Stephen Sondheim’s great musical Sweeny Todd, which was adapted from a play. I think the culture be richer for it if artists who feel compelled to work with the books and characters they loved as kids, were free to do so, and to do it full-time if there’s enough of a market for their work.

Often, when I make this argument, people ask me how I’d feel if someone out there produced a sleazy porno Hereville comic. Well, obviously, I’d be appalled. But just because I find someone else’s work appalling, doesn’t mean it should be illegal.

1. Actually, no artist in the world creates from scratch.

On another thread, Amy wrote:

If you don’t like freedom of speach then TURN THE STATION! Oh my god! I do not agree with most of Rob or Arnie’s mentality but I do agree that they have the freedom to say what they feel. And if you are a true listener of the show, you know that they would never advocate child abuse. It’s absurd and I’m extremely frustrated that everyone having an issue with this is so stupid to just change the channel if what they say upsets you so much. It’s YOUR choice to listen to what you want to on the radio. No one is forcing you to listen to them. All these posts have so much disdain for them. If you hate them so much, why are you listening. Its people like you who make our men fighting this devastating war we’ve been in for years, feel like they are doing it for nothing. Our freedom of speach is one of the many things they are fighting for. I have many gay and lesbian friends and I feel that transgenders are born the way they are and support them 100% in their choices - but this vigilanty actions towards two radio dj’s who most of the time make jokes on air - it’s ridiculous. And they have made fun of things that I stand for or represent - but I don’t take it personally - I just change that channel.

Amy, freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from criticism, and it doesn’t mean freedom from consequences.

* * *

There are times I have doubts about boycotts because of something someone said. It seems wrong to boycott (for example) a brand of pencil because you’ve heard that the pencil manufacturer is anti-gun-control. Because even if only governments can censor, there’s still a threat to free speech created if people are frightened of losing their jobs if they say something unpopular.

But I don’t feel that way about radio DJs. It is their job to be popular. There are some jobs you can’t do if your opinions make you so repulsive that listeners and sponsors revolt, and DJ happens to be one of those jobs. If Rob and Arnie can’t take being judged for their words, and being judged by how valuable they are to their sponsors — then they really, really chose the wrong industry to work in.

* * *

Free speech has consequences. I think you believe Rob and Arnie’s speech only has consequences because people are kicking up a fuss, instead of turning the dial. But I think you’re mistaken about that.

Amy, imagine for a moment that you’re a 13 year old kid who doesn’t fit into the gender roles assigned to you (either because you’re trans, or because you don’t fit in in some other way). Imagine the self-hatred you’ve learned from society around you, and think of how hard that is to overcome — as if being 13 isn’t hard enough on most of us already. Then imagine hearing this on the radio:

They are freaks. They are abnormal. Not because they’re girls trapped in boys bodies but because they have a mental disorder that needs to be somehow gotten out of them. [...] You know, my favorite part about hearing these stories about the kids in high school, who the entire high school caters around, lets the boy wear the dress. I look forward to when they go out into society and society beats them down.

Can you imagine how devastating that could be? Sure, it would be only one more straw on an already heavily burdened back — but it would be a big, vicious straw. It’s the kind of straw that, combined with hundreds of other straws, sometimes leads kids to take their own lives.

What would have happened if no one had kicked up a fuss — if everyone had shrugged and said “that’s just good old Rob and Arnie, their regular listeners know they didn’t mean any harm?”

Well, they still would have done harm. They would have done harm to every kid, trans or cis,¹ whose own self-contempt would have been made more implacable by hearing Rob and Arnie’s contempt; and they would have done harm through every person who heard their jokes and got the message that trans people are “freaks” who deserve disdain.

There are always, always consequences.

There was never, ever an option for Rob and Arnie to tell these vicious “jokes” without consequences.

Someone would have suffered the consequences.

The only question was, who.

If no one had objected, if no one had spoken up and said “that’s stupid, horrible, vicious bullshit, and Rob and Arnie should be ashamed, and KRXQ should be ashamed, and anyone who sponsors this show should be ashamed,” then the consequences would have been borne mainly by trans people, and also by some non-trans kids who nonetheless suffer gender-related bullying and self-hatred. It would have been another brick in the wall; just another thing pushing our society to be marginally more brutal, and marginally more contemptuous, towards people who don’t fit into the standard gender/sex roles.

Instead, some people did speak up. And as a result of that…

Well, now a portion — not all, but part — of the consequences have been diverted, so they are now suffered by Rob and Arnie, rather than solely by the kids they’ve displayed so much “joking” contempt for. Is that such a bad thing? Seems very fair to me.

And maybe Rob and Arnie will make the apology good, and maybe some trans kid will hear them say that expressing contempt for trans kids is wrong in every way. And maybe that’ll do some good. And I suspect they’ll be doing some fundraising or donations to organizations that help trans kids, and if so, maybe that’ll do some good.

Or maybe some trans kids will hear about this, and know that people got angry on their behalf, and hear that even major corporations like AT&T and Carl’s Jr found the open expression of trans-hating “jokes” so repulsive that they yanked their advertising. Maybe some kids will, as a result of this, feel like a few of those straws have been lifted from their backs. And that’ll do some good.

And maybe future radio DJs will remember, before they make similar “jokes,” that jokes which express contempt towards the oppressed and the marginalized always, always carry consequences, even if those consequences are usually suffered by people who aren’t famous and who don’t have their own radio shows. Maybe they’ll remember that their “jokes” can do harm, and they’ll decide to tell a joke about how much the airlines suck instead of picking on trans kids.

Would that be so awful?

And yes, maybe deep inside, they’ll still be thinking that it would be hilarious to “joke” about society beating trans kids down, and how swell that would be. And maybe the only thing keeping them from making that “joke” on the air will be that they’re frightened that maybe, this time, they will suffer some of the consequences themselves. Maybe they’ll bite their tongues and just tell those “jokes” in a bar among friends, instead of on the air to tens of thousands of listeners.

Would that be so awful?

I don’t think it would be.

What would be awful would be a society in which freedom of speech never had consequences; in which people who disagreed with Rob and Arnie’s “jokes” didn’t speak up; in which the message would be communicated that it’s acceptable to talk about trans kids as if they’re less valuable than dirt and no one objected. That would be awful. And I’m very glad that didn’t happen. You should be, too.

UPDATE: For more on consequences, please read this post at Bunny’s Hutch. (Thanks, Elusis.)

1. ”Cis” means “not trans.”

Here’s an email I just sent to the ISP that hosts “Alas, a Blog.” This is regarding the cartoonist Donna Barstow, who work has been criticized on “Alas” here and here. Donna sent an email to the ISP, which the ISP forwarded to me.

Part of Donna’s complaint is that two of her cartoons have been reproduced on “Alas” (which I think is fair use). However, it’s clear that her complaints relate to the entire posts, not just the copyrighted cartoons. For example, she complains about the charge of racism, calling it “defamation.” She also quoted some other ISP’s policy against “Threats & Harassment,” which I think is misplaced, since criticizing her work is not a threat nor harassment.

The email I sent the ISP:

Dear Ben,

Thanks for forwarding Donna Barstow’s email to me.

I believe I have a first amendment right to criticize Ms. Barstow’s cartoons, including reproducing a cartoon of hers under the “fair use” provisions of copyright law.

However, I hope it will help your situation that neither cartoon she refers to is currently hosted on your server. They are both “hotlinked” from the blog but hosted on another web server. So you can honestly tell Ms. Barstow that neither of her cartoons are on your servers, and this has nothing whatsoever to do with your ISP. I hope that will convince her to stop bothering you.

It is my understanding that political criticism of published, publicly available cartoons falls squarely under the “fair use” standard, and that I’m well within my rights to show my readers a political cartoon in order to critique its politics. As a professional political cartoonist myself, I’ve had the same thing happen to me countless times. Donna Barstow is attempting to use bullying and legal threats to shut down legitimate, legal criticism of her publicly displayed political cartoons.

I really hope you’re not going to give in to something like this. It’s a real threat to freedom of speech if ISPs are willing to remove political criticism removed from blogs if the person being criticized sends a strongly worded email.

I am certainly willing to discuss this further with you. Please email me if you have any further questions or concerns.

Best wishes,

Barry Deutsch

Related.

I’m just sayin’.

Oh — and Howard without his stogie? Sacrilege.

Howard the Duck, by the way, is a prime example of how both creators and fans lose out when corporate entities own comic book characters, rather than creators.

From Raw Story:

Fast food giant McDonald’s has denied workers compensation benefits to a minimum wage employee who was shot when he ejected a customer who had been beating a woman inside the restaurant.

A representative of the administrator for McDonald’s workers compensation plan explained that “we have denied this claim in its entirety as it is our opinion that Mr. Haskett’s injuries did not arise out of or within the course and scope of his employment.”

Nigel Haskett, then aged 21, was working at a McDonald’s in Little Rock, Arkansas last summer when he saw a patron, later identified as Perry Kennon, smacking a woman in the face. A surveillance video of the incident, which had been posted to YouTube, was taken down after McDonald’s charged copyright infringement, but according to written descriptions of the video, Haskett tackled Kennon, threw him out, and then stood by the door to prevent him from reentering.

Kennon went to his car, returned with a gun, and shot Haskett multiple times. Haskett staggered back into the restaurant and collapsed.

He has over $300,000 in medical bills. Three takeaway points here:

1) McDonalds is scum.

2) We need a better copyright system. (The clip is now available online, as the story says, because a news station broadcast it — but that was luck. What legitimate creative purpose is served by letting McDonalds claim copyright over that clip?)

3) We need a better health care system.

Curtsy: The Debate Link.

UPDATE: If you’d like to let McDonalds know what you think about this, here’s a contact page.

(You can download higher-quality versions of the above trailer here.)

I’ve been a fan of Nina Paley’s comic strips for years, but I didn’t know she’s also an animator. Josh Jasper recently gave me a head’s-up about her full-length, unreleased film, “Sita Sings The Blues.” It’s a bit hard to describe what the film is about, although Roger Ebert, who absolutely loved it, gives it a try.

She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. [...] Paley synchs her life story and singing and dancing with recordings of the American jazz singer Annette Hanshaw (1901-1985)[...] In San Francisco, we meet an American couple, young and in love, named Dave and Nina, and their cat, named Lexi. Oh, they are in love. But Dave flies off to take a “temporary” job in India, Nina pines for him, she flies to join him in India but he is cold to her, and when she returns home she receives a cruel message: “Don’t come back. Love, Dave.” Nina despairs. Lexi despairs. Cockroaches fill her apartment but she hardly notices. One day in her deepest gloom she picks up the book Ramayana and starts to read. Inspiration begins to warm the cold embers of her heart.

There are uncanny parallels between her life and Sita’s. Both were betrayed by the men they loved. Both were separated by long journeys. Both died (Sita really, Nina symbolically) and were reborn–Sita in the form of a lotus flower, Nina in the form of an outraged woman who moves to Brooklyn, sits down at her home computer for five years and creates this film.

The 80-year-old recordings by Annette Hanshaw which Paley used in her film are now in the public domain. But the songs themselves are not, and the owners — who are large corporations, not the songwriters — demanded about $20,000 a song (about $220,000 total) up front before they’ll give permission for the film to be commercially distributed or sold on DVD — much more than Paley is ever likely to profit from the film, if it’s distributed. (Paley may get them to agree to “only” $50,000 for a limited-run DVD release). Negotiating that much has cost Paley about $10,000 in legal fees.

(Paley has offered to pay royalties from the film’s hypothetical profits, but the music corporations don’t find that acceptable.)

The supposed purpose of copyright law is to encourage artists to create. “Sita Sings The Blues” shows how copyright law fails to achieve this purpose. Rather than encouraging Paley to create, the law makes it as hard as possible on her. And for what? Does anyone believe that the people who wrote Hanshaw’s songs, 80+ years ago, would have chosen not to write the songs had they known that almost a century later, Nina Paley would use the songs in an animated film? Does anyone believe that Annette Hanshaw would have preferred that her songs not be listened to?

It’s not just Paley who loses out. It’s us, as audience members, being deprived not only of a chance to see “Sita Sings The Blues,” but also deprived of the chance to see the films or comic strips that Paley could currently be putting her energy and money into — energy and money that is instead being diverted into trying to get permission to legally distribute “Sita.” Furthermore — much against Paley’s wishes — her story is now being used as a cautionary tale, telling artists to limit themselves, to censor themselves before the big corporations do it to them.

Copyright has become, for artists, principally a barrier to creation.

Posted in Comics and cartooning, Free speech, censorship, copyright law, etc.      

There is a new kind of poetry happening in NYC called The Poetry Brothel. The basic idea is that the poets are prostitutes and the patrons are johns who pay to have poetry read to them in private. There is also a featured performed, who is promoted in a tone recalling the promotion of burlesque, and the whole presentation in general, I think, is meant to recall the speakeasy’s of the prohibition era. Here is a review of the event. Some excerpts (I have eliminated some of the line breaks from the original):

The prostitute whispers, wets her lips and prepares to bare… her heart with a poem. Welcome to New York’s Poetry Brothel, where punters delve between the lines, not the sheets. At a weekend session in a Manhattan night club called the Zipper Factory the look was bona fide bordello. Literary ladies of the night flitted between intimate, candle-lit nooks, red lights and paintings of nudes. Some of the poetesses for sale sported retro-style garter belts and frilly knickers. One swanned about in a top hat and feather boa. But transactions at the Poetry Brothel are of the mind, not the body, and a moment with the catalogue, replete with pictures and whimsical descriptions, reveals what’s on offer.

The Madame — real name Stephanie Berger — came dressed for the part in low-cut dress, elbow-length black gloves and a peacock headdress. “I’d rather be in the bedroom hearing poetry than listening to some old man sitting on a chair on a stage,” she explained by the light of a guttering candle. One-on-one encounters, for which “clients” pay three to five dollars in addition to a 15 dollar entry fee and one free reading, took place upstairs. The “whores” read from their own material, much of which is free verse, making for intense, sometimes baffling performances.

…

But for those needing a break, the Poetry Brothel laid on flamenco guitarists, a fortune-teller, a blackjack table and a bar specializing in port and whisky[.] The young hedonists, most of them students, appear to have struck a surprisingly successful formula. “There just aren’t that many poetry readings where poets show a lot of cleavage,” said The Professor, otherwise known as Jennifer Michael Hecht, aged 43 and a real life professor at Manhattan’s New School. She teaches writing to many of the Brothel’s regulars and is proud of the result.

…

“It’s kind of like the Weimar Republic without the Nazis. At two in the morning you have 20- or 30-year-olds lying all over the place reading poetry,” she said.

…

The Madame promised that the Poetry Brothel welcomed all. “Many are young men with perhaps a secret interest in poems,” she murmured. “Just look at the menu. Get a recommendation. Or say you don’t care. Say: ‘I need poetry. I’m hungry.’”

On the Poetics Listserv to which I subscribe, there has been a mildly heated discussion of this. Here are some snippets (I have retained all original punctuation, etc.):

Ruth Lepson wrote: cooptation of poetry by capitalist objectification of women. not funny. to use a brothel as a metaphor is disgusting. I remember when Denise Levertov criticized a poet for using napalm as a metaphor for personal pain, saying you don’t know what it feels like & it’s much worse than the way you are characterizing it.

Adam Tobin wrote: Why is the capitalist exploitation of women at a brothel worse than, say, the capitalist exploitation of women at a Zipper Factory? It’s just a different kind of labor, no? Given that some artists are seemingly comfortable with capitalism, why should they not acknowledge it in the name of their ventures?

I understand, of course, that brothels have a particular history with a
particular kind of violence attached to it, but so do factories. Do you
direct the same righteous anger at Andy Warhol?

John Cunningham wrote: Political correctness be dammed, I like the idea of “Poetry Brothel”. Firstly, isn’t feminine or feminist poetry (whichever you prefer) spoken from the body. Secondly, here is a legally sanctioned place of ‘intercourse’ (the poetic kind, a.k.a. communication) where the practitioner are protected. For those of you who are speaking out against the body being used in commerce, why are you not speaking out against football or hockey where male bodies are being used in commerce? When you consider the damage that is done to the male body during that contact sport and the lingering effects of it in terms of permanent injury and disability such as arthritis and other diseases, isn’t this just as bad? Or is it that one affects women whereas the other affects men? If we’re going to get on a train, lets get on the right one - the one that carries both male and female on equal terms.

Gwyn Mcvay wrote: Omigod, you’re so right. I hurt in my anterior cruciate ligaments for all of those men FORCED or DECEIVED into collegiate and professional sports every year; BEATEN if they try to leave; often denied any other employment options in the case of being transgendered; not allowed to keep a PENNY of their earnings… oh wait.

First, I have to be honest and admit that I have not actually gone to The Poetry Brothel, so I cannot report firsthand on what it is like, and so what I am talking about here–as were most of the people on the Listserv–is the idea of it, and I confess to being of two minds about this. On the one hand, The Poetry Brothel strikes me as brilliant satire; on the other hand, I think it goes too far for precisely the reasons that Ruth Lepson articulated in her response. But maybe that’s what good satire is supposed to do; and yet, talking about it as satire implicitly ignores the fact that it is an ongoing event, where real people spend real money, which someone somewhere is collecting and using (for whatever purpose).

Any thoughts?

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

That guy, in this case, is Chad Michael Morrisette, who has come up with a hi-larious Halloween display:

A West Hollywood Halloween display showing a likeness of Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin hanging by a noose has caused a furor among some residents who reported it as a hate crime, authorities said Monday.

But Los Angeles County sheriff’s officials said the mannequin sporting a beehive hairdo, glasses and a red coat does not rise to the level of a hate crime because it was part of a Halloween display.

“I’m not defending this; I’m not criticizing it. It doesn’t rise to the level of hate crime,” said Steve Whitmore, spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who said he went out to the house himself to look at the display this morning.

“Now, if there was a crime against bad taste . . . ”

[...]

The home’s decorations also feature a doll of John McCain surrounded by decorative flames in the chimney, and other more typical Halloween items, such as skeletons and spider webs.

See? It’s funny because they’re suggesting the metaphorical death of two candidates for president and vice president! Ha!

Chad and crew, come here. Listen. It’s your old pal Jeff here, and I’ve got something to say to you.

QUIT BEING DOUCHEBAGS.

If you want to do a Halloween display with John McCain and Sarah Palin as scary zombies, you could probably make that work. Heck, it would probably be funny. This? This isn’t funny, it’s sick. It’s playing with the notion that it’s okay to kill those we disagree with.

It isn’t. It isn’t even okay to joke about it.

Yes, freedom of speech has to be taken into account here. I’m not sure the police can shut down a political display (though as absolutist a free speech advocate as I am, even I tend to think this crosses the line from speech to threats — which aren’t protected speech). But who cares if the police can shut this down — you should have enough respect for your opponents and your country to, as Barack Obama says, disagree without being disagreeable.

I don’t much care for John McCain or Sarah Palin. I think that if elected, they would be bad for America — the latter more than the former. I think the policies they advocate are reckless, and I think both have shown a dangerous unwillingness to engage in the serious task of policy discussion. But I don’t want them to die. I simply want them to lose next Tuesday. And John can go back to his seven houses and his wife and his Senate seat; Sarah can go back to her tanning bed and the First Dude and her kids. And they can live long and happy lives that don’t involve them running the country.

That’s how our system is supposed to work. Demonizing our opponents, making them out to be inhuman, deserving of death — this is beneath us. And don’t tell me that the Republicans did it first. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and frankly, for all the bile that’s come out on the right, I’ve seen but one image of Obama with a noose — and I was outraged by it, and rightly so.

It’s not less offensive because you put a white woman in the noose — during National Violence Against Women Awareness Month, mind you. The noose may have a special place in Hell for its symbolism in lynching, but there are plenty of women who are brutalized in this country. Intimating violence against Palin ignores that fact, just as intimating violence against McCain ignores the very real violence he’s suffered — and the very real violence men in this country can face.

And both images echo the too-common dark times in our nation’s history, when politicians and activists have been silenced not with the ballot, but with the bullet.

No, this isn’t cute. It isn’t funny. And in its stunning intolerance for the very existence of our opponents, it is anathema to the ideals of the progressive movement. It undermines our civil society. And it marks you, the folks who came up with it, as world class douchebags.

Stop being douchebags. And get off my side.