Steal this post: ‘Divine Loophole’ and ‘Sita Sings the Blues’
Ghee Happy’s deeply satisfying big brother, Ramayana: Divine Loophole, just went live on the Chronicle Books site. Or, if you can wait a couple of weeks, you can pre-order for $10 less on Amazon.
From what limited previews I’ve seen, the book’s art style is somewhat reminiscent of Sita Sings the Blues in that it’s bright, flat and retro. But its style is more jagged, less twee, despite Ghee Happy’s anime-style sloe eyes. Sanjay’s also got quite the eye for hipster fonts which get me hot and bothered.
The greater difference is in the artists’ approaches to copyright. Sanjay Patel’s day job is as a Pixar animator. Last fall he took me and Chiraag of PMH on a wonderful tour of the company’s storyboards, treehouse-style interiors and hidden speakeasies. The company is remarkably small, punches far above its weight, and has art students elbowing to get in. Like most people at large content shops, Sanjay holds traditional views on copyright. He slaves over his artwork and proofs in his little spare time, and it irritates him when someone ganks his drawings for a yoga studio or shoddy knick-knacks in Bandra.
In contrast, Nina Paley’s nightmarish experience getting copyright clearance for Annette Hanshaw recordings from the ’20s turned her into a full-blown free-culture warrior. What Nina did with ancient jazz could not have been anticipated by the singer when she was alive. Nina reused it in a novel way, mashing it up with an ancient epic to create something new. But rights clearing departments are designed to get large movie houses to cough up cash. They’re not set up for solo animators turning out works of genius in their bedrooms. And like pharma companies, rights holders like Disney have lobbied hard to get protection terms extended, destabilizing the original bargain, so their old characters don’t fall into the public domain.
Nina released the movie free online and benefited from an effect widely known to Internet startups: giving something away free gets you many times more customers than charging even a fraction of a penny, because you’ve eliminated the monetary and mental transaction friction. No typing in a credit card, no weighing cost vs. benefit. Giving it away earned her goodwill so she could sell merchandise and signed DVDs to some of her new fans.
Up to this point, Nina had managed to flip a legal and budgetary disadvantage into a powerful promotional tool. She then went full Ikari Warrior and released her original Flash files for any would-be animator to learn from. Since she was benefiting from free culture, she saw a Thai fashion designer using her artwork as free publicity. At the end of the day, she’s earned good money from the ancillary revenue streams. By getting the movie out there, she’s earned praise from big-name reviewers, been fêted at major film fests and even had paid theatrical runs.
Nina’s strategy works best for market newcomers without much brand recognition. It disrupts the biz models of existing players — a Disney is hardly going to copy her strategy of giving her movie away free — and has made her arthouse-famous. But the money Sita’s earned to date wouldn’t sustain a much larger enterprise. The trick, IMO, is to convert the Sita mini-empire into a freemium model, where the movie is in effect a promotional sample enticing fans to pay for merch and maybe follow-on movies.
Sanjay’s ideal promotional strategy looks different. He’s already got a following in the arts and desi communities and should do just fine. The question is whether there’s something he can give away at near-zero marginal cost. He might, for example, post do-it-yourself color prints as PDF files and upsell limited-edition screen prints.
If the goal is to create a business, the absolutist free-culture position doesn’t automatically make it viable. When it does, it tends to vaporize most of the revenues of the old model (e.g. Craigslist vs. local ads). Making it work depends highly on the details of the individual business. Nina’s approach was ballsy and risky. With the benefit of hindsight, it looks incredibly innovative. Some authors are now giving away entire ebooks to get people hooked. It all confirms the old writer’s maxim: worse than poverty, obscurity.
on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010, 9:47 am in Art, Business, Literature, Religion › 
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Thanks Manish! Some corrections/explanations:
“Nina first released the movie free online because she hadn’t yet cleared the music rights.”
That’s incorrect; it’s just as illegal to share infringing work for free as to sell it commercially, the only difference being the maximum prison sentence (5 years for non-commercial, 10 years for commercial). This misconception comes up over and over again in discussions about me, so I correct it here:
“But the money Sita’s earned to date wouldn’t sustain a much larger enterprise.”
Most movies, big or small, lose money. Sita’s free model generates more income for me than conventional distribution would. Larger enterprises subsidize the majority of their money-losing projects with a few blockbusters.
“The trick, IMO, is to convert the Sita mini-empire into a freemium model, where the movie is in effect a promotional sample enticing fans to pay for merch…”
Yes, that’s how free works. You use the unlimited resource (digital copies) to sell the limited resource (physical goods). Techdirt just shared a great list of 10 “reasons to buy.”
Another way I put it: the content is free, the container is not.
Sanjay’s new book has cultural value; it looks beautiful in the photos, and I’m eager to get a copy. It also has sale value as an art object . You can’t download paper and quality printing for free. Yes, you can use a paid service like Lulu.com, but good mass-produced books can be higher quality and therefore more valuable (as well as less expensive per-copy to manufacture, so more profitable too). Likewise, you can’t download a cinema, which is why people pay for movie tickets to see “Sita” in theaters.
“Free” isn’t that different from “proprietary” in that ultimately it generates income the same way: sales of limited goods. The difference is that proprietary models try to enforce artificial scarcity where there is none, which leads to invasion of privacy, curtailing civil liberties, and stifling cultural progress. The “Free” in Free culture is the same as that in Free Enterprise, Free Markets, and Free Speech. No one thinks Free Markets threaten entrepreneurs, yet people think Free Culture = less money. In fact the opposite is true. I’m in Free Culture partly because I like money, and want to make more of it doing what I love.
Please note that the amount of money Nina Paley is making through audience-based distribution is more than traditional distributors told her to expect using their monopoly-based methods. And she’s being public about the numbers: see http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution for a detailed report.
It’s bizarre. The more Nina succeeds with this freedom-based model, the more people say “Oh, wow, it really demonstrates that this model can be used to… springboard over to a monopoly-based model!” It’s as though a company were really successful selling organic produce, and so people say “That’s great, now that they have a sustainable business model selling this way, maybe they can hope, if they’re really lucky, to become a tenant farmer one day!”
Drawing the conclusion that “Nina’s strategy works best for market newcomers without much brand recognition” gets it backwards. The more brand recognition Nina has, the more successful she is. Indeed, it is precisely because she had brand recognition already — from her previous work, from festival screenings of “Sita Sings the Blues”, and from glowing reviews all over the Internet — that this is working so well for her.
fascinating link and it was interesting to learn the history of copyright. it echoes some of my feeligns about patents and patent law.
@Nina:
Thanks, fixed this. Assumed it would be illegal but no damages.
Very cool, congrats! My point is a bit different: if a large picture house threw marketing money at a film like Sita, wouldn’t it scale up?
Coming from the tech world (as did you, no?), I believe everything is going to bits and bits are valuable. What value is a container when you can custom-3D print or custom-lathe it off designs downloaded from the Net? Look at it another way: today we buy art prints. Tomorrow I’ll be able to print them out online. In that world, do you pay for container or bits?
Craigslist eviscerated local ads, Webmail killed the $10 monthly ISP email account and so on. All this is good for consumers. Doesn’t help the old businesses. Not saying they deserved to survive– they have to adapt– it’s just a fact.
@Karl:
See above.
Well, sure, you have to seed your publicity with something, but to overlook the effect of free global online distribution is a bit strange.
Illuminating post and comments. Enjoyed and financially supported both.
After a reputation is earned, aren’t more revenue streams possible?: T-shirts, books,
tours, lectures, sequels, action figures, etc.
Possibly I phrased something poorly? I certainly didn’t mean to ‘overlook the effect of free global online distribution”.. it’s kind of the core of my point :-).