SESSION 6. UNDERSTANDING FREE CONTENT

If it’s free, how do you make money? What do all those different Creative Commons licenses mean and which one is best for my project?  What’s the difference between ‘free’ as in free speech and ‘free’ as in free beer? These questions and more will be answered in this 90-minute session with Sita Sings the Blues filmmaker, Nina Paley.

Free Content is an extremely simple concept with millennia of precedents, but a century of copyright restrictions have conditioned us to unnecessarily complicate it. Here we will sort out:

• How ‘free’ has been generating money in software for over two decades
• Why open licenses protect your work better than conventional copyright
• How to use the Unlimited Resource to sell the Limited Resource
• The difference between Content and Containers
• How fans support artists they love
• The changing role of distributors
• The limits of the Internet
• The Creator Endorsed Mark

…and more!

NINA PALEY, Filmmaker

Nina Paley is the creator of the animated musical feature film Sita Sings the Blues, which has screened in over 150 film festivals and won over 30 international awards including the Annecy Grand Crystal, The IFFLA Grand Jury Prize, and a Gotham Award. Her adventures in our broken copyright system led her to Copyleft her film, and join QuestionCopyright.org as Artist-in-Residence. Prior to becoming an animator Nina was a syndicated cartoonist; she is now re-releasing all her old comics under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. She teaches at Parsons School of Design and is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow.