Your Face is a Saxophone is a surrealist satire of the advertising industry, which makes fun of actual companies and brands. It tells the story of the staff of Buzzword Marketing, and their dealings with the absurd demands of their corporate clients. Also, everybody has inanimate objects instead of heads for some reason. It’s either an artistic statement on how consumerism objectifies us all, or an excuse for us to not have to animate their mouths moving; you decide. As a bonus, Your Face is a Saxophone is Public Domain under CC0.

My friends and I formed Plankhead to produce the series. At the beginning of 2011, we released the first full-length, 25 minute episode — a pilot that we pitched not to a TV network, but to the Internet. We were able to raise enough money from individual donors to make a second one, which came out astronomically better than the first. Naturally, we’d like to continue the series — we have five more episodes planned, and we’re starting on the third in the next few weeks. But this isn’t just yet another crowdfunded indie project.

Your Face is a Saxophone started out as an assault on advertising. Since it began, I’ve realized that the problems with advertising are just one part — along with the copyright monopoly, unchecked greed, the pursuit of censorship, and other problems — of the holistic problem that is the ancien régime of the corporate entertainment industry. Much like these motivations, Your Face is a Saxophone is a part of a larger whole; a prototype for how to produce, promote, and proliferate culture in complete opposition to the problematic habits of the copyright industry.

I certainly hope you find the show entertaining. But even if you don’t, let me explain why you should still help it succeed:

The Problems

Advertising
In conceiving the project, I decided I was fed up with advertising-supported media. Humanity had created the Internet — possibly the most empowering technology of the millennium — and yet had failed to come up with a better way of sustaining its contents than by splattering ads all over everything. At best, it’s annoying and ugly — São Paulo, Brazil mayor Gilberto Kassab famously called advertising “visual pollution” when banning billboards in 2006. At worst, advertising has a chilling effect on free speech, making it too unprofitable to say something that corporations disapprove of.

So, I decided to prove that a full-length TV show could be made without advertiser support — by making it something that nobody in their right mind would want to sponsor.

But how to finance a show without ad dollars? There’s grants, but that just gives the veto to governments or private foundations instead of corporations. No question: it would need to come from individual fans — the people who actually care about the message. So, that’s why we crowdfunded Episode 2 of Your Face is a Saxophone, and plan to continue that.

Obviously, crowdfunding alone can’t go very far; Mike Masnick reminds us often that “Give it away and pray” isn’t a business model. That’s why many independent creators make their money selling T-shirts, mugs, mousepads, posters, and other merchandise. Except that falls into the trap of…

Selling a Product
The chief reason why the copyright industry is running around with its head cut off is because its products — music, movies, news, information — are no longer products. Everything digitized can, and will, be made available for free, regardless of its creator’s wishes. You can’t sell a non-scarce good.

Obviously, many companies and artists still try this by “selling” digital downloads. But it’s been said that the way to compete with piracy is to respect your customers; selling a glass of tap water is not respectful to your customers.

Whereas the old guard tries to recreate the scarcity of information by lobbying to destroy our civil liberties, more nimble independent players simply find new scarcities to sell. This often takes the form of merchandising, which the copyright industry does its fair share of as well.

But that runs into another problem: everything can, and will, be digitized. Why buy an official T-shirt, poster, mug, or mousepad when you can print your own? 3D printers are set to drop in cost, increase in capability, and pervade society through the next decade, making the sales of merchandise into a very short-sighted business plan.

Merchandising also alienates the audience, reinforcing the false dichotomy of producer and consumer. It turns the art into yet another advertisement, and the fans into nothing but customers for the mass-produced crap which the art is hawking. Speaking of which…

Monologue Culture
When you hear the term “consumerism” thrown around, you often think of what I just alluded to: people being sold a bunch of crap in massive quantities. But the copyright industry fosters another type of consumerism: the consumption of monologues.

Most media takes the form of a creator or author communicating a message to the audience. The audience’s response, input, or thoughts do not matter, because they can’t change the message. This isn’t inherently a bad thing — indeed, it’s often a good thing for one person’s message to be communicated without meddling from others. The problem is that the audience doesn’t feel invested in the message. It doesn’t feel like it’s theirs.

The works which foster large, devoted fanbases are the ones which capture an audience’s imagination. A well-built fantasy world will inspire thousands of fan-fiction spinoffs; a great piece of music will inspire thousands of cover performances; a video game is already more engaging simply because it’s interactive, but open, hackable code will inspire thousands of modifications. Works like these do get the audience invested, and give them a sense of ownership.

This creates two challenges. First, not every story worth telling, song worth performing, or creation worth creating has the capacity to inspire direct remixing; Hitchcock’s Psycho isn’t the most fertile ground for a fan-fiction movement, for example. That point, I’d like to get back to. For now, let me digress with the second challenge: the fact that the copyright industry makes such creative communities illegal.

Creative Monopolies
Through use of the copyright monopoly, the industry acts as an oppressive creator’s guild. If you’re not a member of their inner circle, they don’t want you to be creating anything. They can achieve this because there is no such thing as “originality” in creative work; everything is based on, built on, or inspired by something that came before. Sometimes, the best new work comes from directly appropriating the past.

This is what makes the copyright monopoly so powerful. Hollywood can license a soundtrack of popular music, but an independent filmmaker cannot. Live performance venues cannot exist without paying licensing fees to the Big Three record companies, just in case a performer does something that might intersect with a copyright. Spinoffs and sequels to stories are the exclusive domain of the original publisher, and fan-fiction is regularly intimidated or sued out of existence. These are just a few examples of the hundreds of ways in which copyright monopolies are used to financially repress artists outside of the guild.

The attacks on civil liberties by the copyright industry aren’t about irrational fears of piracy or lost sales. The executives in charge aren’t that stupid; they’re well aware that the entertainment industry is growing, not shrinking. It is chiefly about stifling competition from the masses themselves. They fear that if we can meet all of our entertainment needs with YouTube videos, independent music, local art communities, and other such things, then we’ll no longer want to watch their TV and movies, listen to their music, read their books, or play their games. And they’re right. As Clay Shirky said in his legendary TED Talk, “Time Warner has called, and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming, not producing, not sharing. And we should say no.”

The problem is, having entrenched themselves and stifled competition for over a century, the copyright industry has our work cut out for us.

Nowhere Else To Go
While I was drafting this post, Paul M. Davis of Shareable happened to put out an article describing many of my concerns. Davis is ambivalent towards Techdirt’s Sky is Rising infographic, and writes:

For the truly DIY — the creators with limited resources who live precarious lives to pursue their passions while navigating an ever-changing media landscape — the effect of the Internet is far more complex than optimistic infographics and studies often suggest.

[A]s traditional sources of industry support (promotion, distribution, and simple business admin) crumble, it can take longer for indie artists to reach the critical mass of audience awareness to quit their day jobs. In the meantime, the workload for creators has increased, until they begin consistently making enough money to hire others to handle the additional labor that the Internet adds to the equation.

It’s unquestionably a good thing that the Internet is dismantling the copyright industry’s distribution monopoly, but its promise of eliminating their stranglehold on promotion hasn’t been fully realized. Before the Internet, creative people had to play the lottery, hoping that a corporate agent would notice them and scoop them up. Now, creative people still have to play the lottery, hoping that somebody with a large social network will notice them and tweet a link to their website. The odds may be better, but it’s still a raw deal.

The notion that artists need to work a day job until they one day “make it” is a tragedy, not a desirable component of a healthy society. As I’ve touched on previously, distracting people by forcing them to worry about meeting their basic needs holds back human progress. The copyright industry has done a poor job of solving this problem, but thus far, so has the Internet. As Davis says, DIY promotion for an unknown artist is still absurdly difficult.

I’ve witnessed this firsthand, in fact. The second episode of Your Face is a Saxophone was released at the end of October 2011. The reason you’re seeing this article months later is because working full-time on its production bankrupted me. When I said we’d raised enough money to make the episode, I was referring to buying new equipment — there wasn’t much left over to cover anybody’s cost of living. While finding and keeping a day job, I neglected to open-source the assets and project files, enact a promotional strategy, finish subtitling the new episode, or do much of anything that I’d needed to. Being unable to pay one’s bills is, as you can imagine, very distracting.

The Solution

It’s these problems that we’d like to tackle with Your Face is a Saxophone, using it to lay the groundwork for a new creative culture. Others may have pioneered the bits and pieces I’m about to describe, but it’s time to put them together in a cohesive, intentional whole.

Free and Open Source
Your Face is a Saxophone is CC0 Public Domain. Once an episode is finished and released, it belongs to the commons, irrevocably. We wouldn’t be able to enforce any copyright monopoly on it even if we someday lost our minds and wanted to.

Furthermore, it will be entirely open source. All art assets, audio, project files, and (if feasible) renders will be made available to the public. We’ll use as many open formats as possible (sadly, I haven’t had the time to learn Blender, so the first two episodes’ project files are in the propirateary (that’s not a typo) Apple Motion 5 format).

We won’t use creative monopolies, and through open source, we’ll chip away at the monologue culture problem. To further attack that…

Selling a Process
As my experiment in impromptu filmmaking shows, people enjoy creating things — and it’s not just self-described “artists” who find the creative process to be just as entertaining, if not more, than experiencing the final product. This is why video games which spark people’s creativity — for example, anything that Will Wright has ever been tangentially involved with — have proved to be so massively popular.

But not every message worth communicating can be expressed in an interactive medium. There will always be a place for monologue media — for immutable text, sound, or imagery comprised solely of the vision of its author(s). That’s why we need to blur the line between audience and author, consumer and producer, by bringing the fans into the creative process.

We can’t — and shouldn’t — finance Your Face is a Saxophone by selling access to the finished episodes. Instead, we sell access to the community. Everyone who contributes any amount of money to Your Face is a Saxophone becomes a producer of the show.

To describe what that means, here’s an excerpt of an email I sent to current producers a couple weeks ago:

Though Plankhead does provide entertaining things to the world, it’s not — as people who wear suits and have far too high incomes would say — our “core business”. We don’t aim to sustain ourselves (or, in suit-speak, “make money”) by saying to people, “You are the audience”. We do that by saying, “You are the artist”.

If you’re receiving this email, then you were instrumental in the creation of Your Face is a Saxophone. That makes you an artist, because you brought art into being. You’re all artists. Guilty as charged.

And you know how else you’re all artists? Have you ever heard a song, and then hummed it to yourself in your head for hours and hours afterwards? Have you ever quoted a movie to your friends? Ever gone halfway through a terrible pun, put on sunglasses, finished it, and then screamed YEAAAAAAHHHHH? Those are all creative acts. Even if you didn’t make up any original words or sounds, performance — even if nobody’s watching — is creative. You’re all artists.

Everyone has that burning drive to create. Some people have it during urination; they should probably see their doctors and get tested. For everyone else, Plankhead is here to help.

Enough of this abstracty mumbo-jumbo. Let’s talk concrete stuff:

For Episode 3 of Your Face is a Saxophone, we’re going to keep you updated, every step of the way, with production. And you know what I want you to do? Respond. Make comments. Make suggestions. Throw us ideas. Help us create this thing. If you think something should be animated differently, let us know. If you think there’s a hilarious prop missing from a background, tell us. Maybe you can even draw it for us and we’ll put it in. If you think Dave needs to re-record a line because he’s not making Blake sound enough like an adorable idiot, say so. Be a part of the process.

We’ll be putting up wikis and forums and stuff to make this kind of thing easier, but also suggest ideas for how we can share the production process, and get your input. Help us create the creative process.

For future episodes, we’ll also be letting you into the writer’s room. I’ve only written the scripts up until Episode 3, so I’m going to need everyone’s help to flesh out the stories for the remaining four episodes.

YFIAS isn’t just a prototype of a new way to finance art. It’s also a prototype of a new way to create it: having the community involved every step of the way, blurring the line between fan and creator.

This will effectively make our revenue stream completely indifferent to file-sharing. It won’t even be possible to lose a “sale” to a free download, and we’ll be able to brag that we have a 0% piracy rate.

For-Progress, Not For-Profit
We reject the notion that art is an investment that needs to be recouped. It is a desirable end in and of itself. The copyright industry views art as an incidental logistical concern on the path to making money; if they believed they could make more money selling toilet paper, they’d do it. This is the root of the problems that they cause.

I’m not seeking personal financial gain from Your Face is a Saxophone; my cost of living just happens to be a necessary expense of the project. And I’d wager that most artists feel exactly the same way about their work.

We’ll use the success of Your Face is a Saxophone to build Plankhead, our organization, into a support network for artists. A cooperative media company, owned and operated by its creative workers. Were I pitching it to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist — people who like to hear things like “it’s an AirBnb for Facebook games” or whatever — I’d call it “a Mondragon for media”. When we get to that stage, we will promote any work in any medium that is A) technically competent and B) willing to be released under CC0 — and finance it if possible. We’ll do our best to keep personal taste out of the vetting process, because all art has a right to exist.

Ultimately, the goal is not to make artists fabulously wealthy; it’s to keep them fed and clothed so that they can concentrate on creating things.

How You Can Help

To make this happen, we need producers and volunteers.

Today, I’m setting a new fundraising goal of $3000. That amount of money would allow me to devote my full time to animating the third episode for three or four months. If we raise even more than that, we might be able to add a second or third animator to speed the process along. You can contribute and become a producer through our donation page.

We also need people who can help produce, promote, and proliferate the show. A comprehensive list is on our volunteering page, but a few examples include:

• Subtitle translators
• Torrent seeders
• Social network/blog promoters
• Web technicians/designers
• Python coders who can figure out how to automate the “lip”-sync animation so that we can switch to Blender already (or anyone who can help us switch to Blender in any way, for that matter)

People who make significant volunteer contributions will probably get producer status out of the deal.

Ultimately, we need you to help us prove that this works. Let’s give the world hard, concrete evidence that even a traditional TV-length show with no copyright protection whatsoever can be successful. Let’s show that we don’t need to create a false pretense of buying and selling digital “goods” to sustain artists. Let’s validate the idea that art for art’s sake is something that society values, believes in, and wants to exist.

A court has ruled that it is legal to remove works from the public domain and put them back under copyright in the United States.

Okay. That’s it. I can’t take these ridiculous decisions anymore. I’ve been thinking this for a long time, but now I’m just gonna come out and say it:

Intellectual property law in the United States no longer serves the public, and until it has been reformed to do so, it is to be ignored.

We the people of the United States of America have the right, and duty, to disregard and oppose these unconstitutional sections of the law. They no longer serves to, as stated in Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution, “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” The law in its current incarnation actively impedes the Progress of Science and the Arts, and the limited Times are now so lengthy so as to be effectively unlimited. Copyright, patent, and trademark law together not only no longer matches the description in I.8.8, but it in many cases violates the First Amendment.

I believe in the necessity for there to be laws which promote the progress of science and art, and grant the creative persons responsible for such advances the exclusive right to claim a reasonable level of authorial control for a limited time. The former need is not being met by the law at all, and the latter is incidentally met in an unsatisfactory way by the current overarching and easily-abused law. But by upholding the current useful portions of the law, we validate the entirety of it.

As a citizen of the United States, I hereby declare that I do not consent to governance by Intellectual Property law, including, but not limited to, the current laws pertaining to copyrights, patents, and trademarks. I encourage the like-minded people of the United States to join me in affirming our non-consent, and continuing to do so until the law once again serves the public good as outlined in our Constitution.

In regards to my own work, I would appreciate it if the spirit of the Creative Commons licenses I release them under were respected, but please do so out of goodwill, and not out of a false sense of legal obligation to do so.

To the extent possible under law, Zacqary Adam Green has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Intellectual Property Law Has Gone Quite Far Enough and Is Now Hereby Null and Void and the header image preceding it. This work is published from the United States. Not that any of this matters as of this writing, of course, because copyright is null and void; I’m just saying this for when one day it’s valid again.

If you go watch my Hitler video on YouTube, you will now see an annotation stating that I have waived all copyright to it, with the help of Creative Commons‘ CC0 language. It is now in the public domain.

That doesn’t mean anyone can just go around claiming ownership of it though. It means that nobody owns it. It belongs to everybody now. Go do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate it if you give me credit for it, but that’s by no means required.

Anyway, to make this absolutely, positively clear:

There. Enjoy your gift, world. Merry Kwanzaa or whatever.

So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with [wikipedia]Young Earth creationism[/wikipedia] in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of [wikipedia]Usenet[/wikipedia] (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.

One of the major cornerstones of furry interest is the visual artwork. Artists draw and paint all sorts of anthropomorphic animal characters, and many of the popular ones make good money selling prints of their work at conventions. The same goes for comic book creators and, more recently, novel authors. While these works sell to adoring fans, much of them are also freely available to view online. But the real money, especially for less universally known artists, is in the sales of commissions. Another cornerstone of furry interest is the “fursona,” an animal character to represent oneself. Many furries would like pictures of “themselves,” and pay artists to do this for them. Once the commissions are finished, the commissioner and artist display them prominently all over the Internet.

Deconstruct this market, and an interesting theory emerges. Artists create works on their own time, and this attracts fans. Many of these fans buy physical copies of the art to show their support. Some others have an idea for a particular work of art they’d like to see produced, and commission the artist to do so. Once this artwork is finished, it is displayed both for the pleasure of the commissioner and everyone else who wants to see it.

These ideas can be scaled up and applied to many other situations. Musicians are having a lot of success with using recordings to attract fans who’ll support their work and come to concerts, and some are doing pretty well with taking commissions. That’s hardly surprising, as Mozart and Beethoven worked in a similar fashion. But it’s not such a stretch to see narrative and interactive media succeeding in a similar fashion. How many times have people in the world thought, “I wish someone would make a movie about [this]“, or “I wish there was a video game where you could [do this]“? Films and games are often larger projects than the budget of a single fan can finance, but Gabe Newell of Valve already thinks a bunch of interested fans could fund a game.

It’s not clear if that would work in our current understanding of the world. Would large projects like films and video games still be able to make a profit if they were funded by fans and then released into the wild, depending on the goodwill of more fans to pay for them after the fact?

To be honest, I hope not. I really hope that the financial implications of producing artwork changes so radically that it no longer makes sense for business to be involved. That’s not to say I hope artists will be unable to support themselves; after all, there’s a big difference in making a living and making a profit. As evidenced by most of what comes out of Hollywood and the LA music industry, “content creators” motivated by profit are generally hacks. Artists motivated by living — the world around them, their lives inspiring their art — are the ones who actually produce things that are worthwhile.

That’s what one sees in these artists who draw animal people. They love and care about what they do, and the money is a side benefit. Few of them get particularly rich from what they do, but that doesn’t matter. It’s this kind of situation that reminds me, file-sharing is not killing music, movies, video games, or anything. It’s killing the artistic cancer that is the copyright industry.

In other words, if you’re not going to draw pictures, write music, make movies, or develop games because there’s no money in it, good. You have the wrong attitude.

I’ve received some skepticism, sometimes based on first-hand accounts, about my theory that pirates will donate to support you if you just ask and make it easy for them. It’s based on the idea that no, they actually won’t.

This strikes me as unlikely. No pirate, hell, no person has ever publicly stated that they don’t believe people who work so hard to entertain us should receive no money in return, and that they’d certainly give money to an artist they support. I don’t think this isn’t happening because all of those people are lying. I think it’s happening because of a lack of education.

The phenomenon of indie artists putting a big “donate” button on their site is a relatively new one. It’s a reflex for many people to buy a movie from Amazon or buy a game from Steam. Donation is a bit more disjointed and confusing, and not everyone knows where to go. If it was downloaded from The Pirate Bay, there’s even more disconnect from the creator’s website. That’s what my new For a Living project is looking to remedy.

Go to the project’s page to download a graphic that you can place in your movie, game, or other form of visual media. It’s like an FBI Warning, except not about how stuff is illegal and instead about how food costs money.

I’m not sure how the same could be applied to music. Podcasts have audible credits and copyright information, so it’s an easy translation. For a music album, doing this on every song would get annoying. Fortunately, a lot of other factors are making it much easier for indie musicians to benefit from file-sharing, so there’s not a lot to worry about.

Large corporations have come up with a solution: go into the manufacturing business. They are now Digital Rights Manufacturing companies, creating new rights for themselves using a revolutionary new process known as “fellating lawmakers”. Their revenue stream comes from licensing these digital rights at high prices, and suing people who don’t pay. But it’s too expensive for indie artists and creators, and it doesn’t win you any friends.

Because of this situation, indie game developers are doing horrible things like experimenting with in-game advertising. I’m not saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of annoying ads bombarding us. I’m saying this as a knee-jerk reaction to the horrors of depending on the advertising industry for revenue.

Think about it: TV series with devoted fanbases are cancelled because they don’t make enough ad revenue. Millions of websites depending on Google AdSense would go broke if their accounts were inexplicably terminated (I’ve read about this happening before but can’t find a link detailing it. Maybe I’m typing the wrong words into Goo…gle…wait a minute). And remember when GameSpot fired Jeff Gertsmann when their advertisers didn’t like his reviews? For people who call themselves indie, it’s not very indie-pendent.

The best way to be indie in any medium, be it game development, filmmaking, music, writing…hell, even running a business in general, the only party you should be depending on is individual people. Some may know them as “customers”, or “users” who “generate content” on your “social media application”, but let’s avoid such corporate-speak, as it makes baby Jesus cry and is killing America. But there’s still the problem of how exactly to make money on individual people anymore. In a world where art is hard work and people don’t seem to want to pay for it, one man will stand up to explain his opinion. That man is me. Reread the previous two sentences in a movie trailer guy voice, then click the jump-cut-continue-reading thingy:

The first step to solving a problem is admitting you have one. Part of the admission process is defining what exactly the problem is, so let’s do that now:

• Indie creators need money
• People seem to prefer downloading stuff for free
• If your money comes from ads, you are a slave to the advertisers

Video games are seemingly the easiest medium to solve this for, but the proposed solutions only work for specific cases. I thought about the approach brought up by Dimerocker (as of writing, their site consists entirely of an unmutable coming-soon video with bad techno music, so don’t click) near the end of the Kotaku piece. Asia has dealt with this problem, and the most popular games there are free-to-play with premium components which you can get for micropayments. Piracy is impossible because the games have to be played on the web. This is great for MMO, arcade, and proceduralist games. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work very well for games disinterested in replay value. Some narrative or art games are meant to be played once, and would not benefit from premium items or costumes or levels. For the same reason, this is no way to make a profit from movies.

But a video game business model which could potentially work for other mediums is a revival of the traditional arcade. Imagine a game in which you could play the first level, and every level after that cost 25 cents. It would be browser-based, or otherwise require an Internet connection, and every level you purchase is accessible to you forever. You can save your game, stop playing, pick it up later as normal, and only pay more when you progress to a new “chapter.” This could be applied to movies and books as well, allowing you to pay by the chapter (in the novel or DVD sense) after getting an initial, free teaser.

Anyone reading this is free to try that out, and I hope it works for you, but I still see problems. Presumably a large service would offer this, so what if such a service were to go offline, temporarily or permanently? Not only would that anger customers, whose purchased movies, books, and games are now inaccessible, but creators, who were dependant on the service for their money. Also, the service would be free to pull any “objectionable content,” which would happen willy-nilly if the history of YouTube and Apple are considered. It’s a combination of DRM server scares and not actually being indie which still doesn’t sit well with me.

Perhaps it would work if everyone assembled such a service themselves. Host files on Amazon S3, take PayPal (or some other, more micropayment-focused service), and you’re done. You’re depending on corporations for the infrastructure, but they’re basically dumb pipes. They won’t shut you down if you’re controversial, and if they go bankrupt, switch to someone else.

Alternatively, for the convenience of people without credit cards or living in countries with taxes or tariffs that cause problems, make payment optional. Very few forms of media can be experienced on the Internet without downloading anything, and technologies allowing you to record music or movies from your screen and speakers prove that people want options. Right now, game developers have a free ride; while it’s possible to hear the same song or see the same movie on your iPod as opposed to your computer, Grand Theft Auto IV probably wouldn’t work all that well (it doesn’t work all that well on PCs in the first place, but I digress). This will change. But because of this desire for options, things need to be downloadable in an open format recognized by whatever Personal Media Device or Mobile Entertainment Console or MPπ player happens to exist. Therefore, piracy will occur, so you need to not depend on people paying for easily redistributable stuff. Make them pay for your continued ability to do work. I don’t have an easy, surefire answer about how to do this, other than that you should make donations easy, flexible, and conspicuous. Allow people to pay whatever they want, and some might pay $5000. If not, at least the 100,000 people who downloaded it from Pirate Bay will pay a dollar. With enough experimentation and loud screaming about this business model, the general public will get used to it, and it will be completely normal.

Either way, all that’s left is getting the word out. But with the ubiquity of Facebook, Twitter, IMing, and the age-old practice of human beings ejaculating the word-language from their face-mouths, anything with a compelling, free teaser and a low-to-no price of entry to its awesomeness will sell itself. Such a system will work very well for the 10% of people who make stuff that isn’t crap.

The other 90% may be out of luck. I’ve been thinking for about a half hour how to follow up that statement, originally believing that’s not a good thing. After all, lots of great ideas fail miserably the first time they’re attempted. But then I realized that that 99% of crap is mediocre, derivative, and boring, failing to add anything new to the world. A decreased chance for mediocrity to achieve anything for a creator is actually a pretty awesome thing. People who genuinely have passion for what they do will improve themselves and come back strong, while idiots jumping on the bandwagon will move on to find something they’re actually good at. To some degree, the world works that way already.

So the best thing for an indie artist, musician, filmmaker, game developer, or writer to do in this day and age is twofold: Don’t suck at what you do, and make it easy for people to realize that.

Wikipedia Art was an attempt at a conceptual “performance art” piece in the form of a Wikipedia article, acting as commentary on Wikipedia itself and…stuff. It was deleted from Wikipedia, not because it wasn’t art, but because it’s not an encyclopedia article. Perfectly reasonable. But then, allegedly, Wikipedia threatened a lawsuit and demanded the artists hand over the Wikipediaart.org domain name. This got the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is essentially an entire organization of crazy Fair Use-hippies like me, very upset. I mean, come on, Wikipedia? The paragon of free knowledge and culture going all RIAA on people?

That’s what I thought. So I decided to do what nobody else had apparently attempted: get a comment from Wikimedia. On Twitter.

• @XerxesQados: @jimmy_wales Are you okay with the threatened lawsuit against http://wikipediaart.org? Seems very anti-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Use #
• @jimmy_wales: @XerxesQados There is no threatened lawsuit. #
• @jimmy_wales: @XerxesQados : Wikimedia says: http://ow.ly/3PhY . I’m disappointed in the EFF – clearly misrepresenting the situation. #

Well. Okay then. What Wales linked to was an official response from Mike Godwin, general legal counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation and predictor of Hitler.

“Wikipedia editors brought the issue of the domain name to our attention, we corresponded with the Wikipedia Arts folks, raising domain name and trademark issues, and the result was a prominent disclaimer. No litigation was threatened or commenced.”

In other words, Wikimedia asked for the domain name, not for the project to be shut down. They did this with VisualWikipedia.com as well, which is essentially a prettier wrapper over Wikipedia, and they now operate as VisWiki. Personally, I think it’s a bit of a stretch that people would get confused about whether any site with “wikipedia” in the domain was a Wikimedia project, but still, it’s nowhere near “threatening artists for fair use.”

EFF, I love you, but calm down. Don’t let yourself get riled up just because some avant-garde artists want attention. I agree, the trademark enforcement doesn’t seem necessary, and it probably could be fought in court, but pick your battles. And YOU, Internet. Yes, YOU. Do more research before ranting on your blogs.

Holy crap, I think I just did journalism.

It’s nothing more than a Google Custom Search which adds “filetype:torrent” to the end of each query, which is doable on regular Google searches as well. Even if The Pirate Google is taken down by someone or other, that functionality will still be available in Google. Of course, given Google’s track record of being a pussy when it comes to defending themselves against Big IP Whoring (because “Big Entertainment” is kind of a stretch), it’s possible that this won’t last. Or it could catalyze Google’s growth of a spine.

Google could “tweak its algorithms” to not allow .torrent files to be indexed (in which case the file extension .tor will come into use, and then .bittorrent when that gets blocked, and so on). That’s not likely, as BitTorrent is mostly used to distribute legitimate, legal files that happen to be gigantic. There’s even an entire BitTorrent tracker devoted to such things. Google knows this, and won’t compromise its mission to index the web. They’re more likely to manually de-index any illegal links that get reported to them by the Big Whores, essentially engaging in an arms race with pirate SEO experts.

Or they could prove the lunatic conspiracy theorists right and report to the rights-whores who’s doing searches for “filetype:torrent” and stuff. That would be scary, but it’s also unlikely that Google will do that, because it would be proving the lunatic conspiracy theorists right. That sort of thing would kill Google’s credibility forever, and people might actually switch to Cuil. That fact alone all but assures that this isn’t going to happen.

So perhaps the Big Whores will go after Google, and Google, unable to compromise, will finally give them the middle finger of common sense in court. And/or the Big Whores will kick their lawsuit habit, detox in rehab, and come back out with an intelligent business model not involving copyright abuse. Either way, it’s safe to say that piracy will soon save the entertainment industry from people getting bored of it and going to the park or something.

For now, The Pirate Google can help you find all those movies that aren’t available in HD on iTunes yet. I mean, I’d totally not steal them if I had the option to pay $2 and download them quickly.

This is very important, even if you’re not up on the whole free culture commons creativity stuff, and I will explain why. Currently, Wikipedia is licensed under something called the GFDL, which stands for “GNU Free Documentation License”, where GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix”, and GNU stands for “GNU’s Not Unix.” Ridiculous nomenclature notwithstanding, this license is intended for “free” documents, which can be distributed and reproduced freely. However, it has quite a few quirks which allow it to work very well for software manuals, and not very well for Wikipedia.

“When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist,” says Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia’s founder, and the GFDL was the only thing around back then which seemed like it worked. But it doesn’t. Wikipedian David Gerard notes that, “Even cutting and pasting text between two Wikipedia articles is technically a violation unless the full author list for that piece of text is attached. This is not workable on a wiki.” The Wikimedia Foundation hasn’t been enforcing some of these troublesome rules, but the fact that it’s part of the license is, legally, not great.

So, in other words, Wikipedia needs to switch to a better license, and they’ve found it in CC-BY-SA. Wikimedia, the Free Software Foundation (maintainers of the GFDL), and Creative Commons have all worked together to make it legally possible, under the latest GFDL, for wikis (such as Wikipedia) to switch to CC-BY-SA. Yes, even the GFDL’s creators want Wikipedia to drop it. All that’s left is you.

Yes, you.

Wikipedia is ridiculously democratic, considering it’s by EVERYONE, so the license change isn’t going through unless the majority agrees that it should happen. Which you should. Otherwise you hate America. And kittens.

Now, the title of this post is a bit misleading, because technically this vote is only open to people who have made 25 edits or more to Wikipedia before March 15th of this year. However, every time you fixed a typo or something counts, so if you’ve ever clicked “edit this page” on Wikipedia and actually pressed the “submit” button when you’re done, just log into Wikipedia and go to the voting page to see if you’re eligible. If you are, please vote yes.

Go vote here in case you didn’t catch the link on the last paragraph. Also, here’s another link to the vote page.

So we finally have an official verdict in the first round of prosecution against The Pirate Bay, or rather the four brave souls willing to play the part of human shields over it.

All four defendants were accused of ‘assisting in making copyright content available’. Peter Sunde: Guilty. Fredrik Neij: Guilty. Gottfrid Svartholm: Guilty. Carl Lundström: Guilty. The four receive 1 year in jail each and fines totaling $3,620,000.

“Assisting in making copyright content available.” What the hell? I was doing that myself when I was fourteen, from the cheap computer in my family’s dining room over a free modem connection. Congratulations, authorities: you’ve succeeded, after all this pomp and circumstance, in royally screwing up the lives of four industrious people with the same charge you would have used to convict me at fourteen for sharing scanned comic books over AOL.

Me, or anyone else, really. It’s the vague and pervasive wording on this that really bothers me. Find me someone in modern society who isn’t guilty of “assisting in making copyrighted material available.” Go on, I challenge you. Yes, your IPhone counts as entrapment. So does your TiVo, your PC, your XBox, and probably a fax machine.

Over a million dollars in fines each and one year in jail. I doubt the money will even be a problem in a case like this… it’ll come form somewhere, these guys aren’t stupid and they’ve had a long time to prepare. And jail time is supposed to accomplish what, exactly? Do I even need to go into how utterly backwards and counterproductive that is? No matter what kind of prison circumstances these guys end up in (I really have no idea, either), it’s supposed to what, give them a year in which to build even more hate for the system and plan what they’re going to do when they get out? Or give them a year to turn into paranoid, survivalist animals? No matter how I look at it, this counts as complete bullshit.

If nothing else, these guys are obviously damned good at what they do, and not likely to appreciate being dicked so hard by The Man. Why not throw them a bone instead and put them to some sort of positive community service. Heal the breach a little, don’t make it worse, you fucking idiots. Cops everywhere are all the same, root out the evil and all that’s left will be sunshine and rainbows. Bullshit. Black and white thinking only means that eventually something purple will appear and run your colorblind ass over because you couldn’t see it.

Just so no one accuses me of being an uninformed doomcrier, let me emphasize that this decision actually means very little at this point… it will be appealed and passed hither and yon for years, and of this moment serves very little purpose other than to illustrate the current political climate. I am only glad that this is not happening in the US, where the media and political circus would be thirty times the size, and my goddamned tax dollars would be paying for it. Sweden can foot this one.

No, Sirs and Madams, this is not about the judgment, this is about the message being sent. And the message, in this case, is pretty piss-poor and simple for an issue with many thousands of jobs and billions of dollars at stake, not to mention the issues of our creative liberties. And please, let’s no one bring up the fact that this isn’t technically happening in America, that doesn’t matter a bit.

Let us faithful not forget the message being sent by the Pirates, either, and I shall quote verbatim: “Fuck You.”

They’ve made it clear that they consider this to be merely a stage play (and I agree, for what it’s worth), and the message they’re sending is one of complete defiance. Their system can’t be touched, they’re willing to go down for it, and they want the world to know this. Personally, I cannot condone this approach; to declare yourself invulnerable on a battlefield is to invite a thousand separate crosshairs to settle upon your very own brow, and you will be unseated, this is the way of things.

Now… this is a tough one for me, a hugely tough one. On the one hand, it’s damned hard for an intelligent person to argue that this is a victimless crime and that it’s all just The Big Evil Corporations ganging up on little guys (okay, okay, it is that, but that’s not my current point). As much as the current media distribution model is horrifyingly corrupt and counterproductive (basically being a giant double-ended dildo tipped with AIDS and battery acid, designed to brutally and profitably rape both the artists and consumers at once from a comfortable, jelly-like middle ground), they do have the right to protect their property, whether it’s evil or not, and on many levels, many people who work in these matters every day really are trying to do what’s best for everyone; not an easy task in this generation.

I would consider working in copyright law right now being akin to being a knight commander in the French army, showing up outside of Crécy in the summer 1346 at the head of thousand armored knights, and idly wondering what the fuck this tiny mob of unruly English thought they were about to do with all those funny looking sticks they were playing with.

Those longbows are basically BitTorrent and other emerging networks, and I don’t think I have to elaborate on who the French knights and nobility are.

The longbow allowed the English to kick the ever-loving barbaric piss out of the French army and nobility, over ten-to-one, and not only won a major battle resoundingly but quite seriously reshaped the way that part of the world worked; militarily, socially, and economically. Little people with better technology have been on the leading edge of nearly every major conflict since.

Unfortunately, it didn’t take long for the elite few in charge to realize that the little people were one hell of a lot easier to control and manipulate than well-fed and well-educated knights and nobles, and us crowing little rebels and pirates out there would do very well to remember this fact. The old guard is changing very slowly in this generation, but it is changing, and when it does, it might be better off if we hadn’t gone out of our way to piss the big boys off as much as we possibly could have.

They might have the funny-looking sticks next time, and they might be smart enough to hide them from us until it’s too late.