Xerxes Atlas Blog

The director of Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley, had to pay $50,000 to use old songs in her animation movie. She then put the movie online for free and turned herself into a free-culture activist. Composer Jaron Lanier was a digital pioneer in the '90s, but in his new book he claims that open-source is destroying creativity and fostering vicious behavior. They join us to debate the pros and cons of free love in art-making.

Once again the music industry has come out with disappointing results for physical music sales, which they blame entirely on file-sharing. What they failed to mention though, is that their findings show that music pirates are buying more digital music than the average music consumer. Since digital music is the future, pirates are the industry’s most valuable customers.

It's with great pleasure that I introduce to you Georgia Wood one of our other directors. Although she wouldn't like to admit it, Georgia is an expert on Musical Theatre - which is a great skill to have if you're trying to produce a musical. We always visit Takapuna beach for meetings, so here we are again with Rangitoto Island as our backdrop. Click here for Georgia Wood's Biography blurb.

http://thenextweb.com/uk/2010/01/18/flickr-independent-dangers-digital-content/

We're incorporated but there's someone else wanting to do an open-source musical now too! The race is on! OK - so this is ALOT different from all the other vlogs.. I got this style idea from www.whatyououghttoknow.com. What do you think? Can I pull it off?

When I spoke to Elliot Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia last month he said that we should consider using the Attribution Share-a-like licence. We'd been thinking of using the Attribution Non-Commercial licence - but he argued that we would get the all the benefits of a groundswell of use by not implementing the Non-Commercial clause but the Share-a-like would be enough to stop the major players. From Elliot's blog:

Here in Australia, a staff member at the ABC, one of the national public broadcasters, informed me that it was unlikely that they would ever use Share Alike-licensed material in an ABC product because there is uncertainty what would need to be licensed on the same terms. As they pondered, “Would that segment have to be licensed? Or the whole show?” The potential scope of what must be licensed on the same terms (which allow remixing) makes the Share Alike licences less appealing to mainstream licensees.

In fact, this blog entry talks about a photographer who's photograph licenced under a Attribution licence was picked up by the movie 'Iron Man'. Although the movie didn't need to ask permission as long as the attributed the work to him,  they choose to maintain their risk-adverse clearances process when dealing with permissions to reuse content and wanted to pay him for his work.

Read the whole article here: http://popcult.cc/?p=191

"Releasing it for free is just good marketing," he says. "Whether it's through piracy or distribution your film is out there on the Internet, so we decided to harness this." And he has managed to make quite a bit of money out of it. Online sales of merchandise — including T-shirts and collector's editions of the DVD — have generated $430,000 on a film that only cost $21,500 to make, Vuorensola says. He and his team have also now secured a proper distribution deal with Revolver Entertainment in the U.S. and Britain.

See the whole story here:

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1950005,00.html?xid=rss-topstories

Paley's credo is that profit can be earned from clever merchandising rather than copyrighted sales of an artist's work. Do away with copyrights, which have "far too little perks for an artist today" , she says. "Artists are gagged by the dictates of labels, publishers and distributors"

Check out the full article:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/music/The-burden-of-lifting-/articleshow/5355549.cms


Part 1/10 on YouTube:

We're going through the process of writing down our business plan. As part of the argument for doing things the way we're doing things, I've been researching other people that have already done something similar successfully. When I was talking to Elliot Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia he sent me a link to a really good presentation on Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. The basic premise is:

Connect With Fans (CwF) + Reason To Buy (RtB) = The Business Model ($$$$)

And you can do this even by giving away your stuff.

Bridget is challenged to use Xerxes Atlas as a PhD topic and Jade talks to Elliot Bledsoe from Creative Commons Australia - he suggests not using the non-commercial licence as we'll get what we want anyway.