Go Free Culture!

I find this documentary The Revolution Will Be Animated really interesting. It showed how Nina Paley encountered many copyright issues while making the film Sita Sings the Blues and how she dealt with it. I like how she has used Creative Commons to free her work into the Free Culture. The idea of Free Culture totally appeal to me as it’s really true from what Nina said in the film, “the more you control it, the less far it can go, so by giving it to the audience, the audience will help to spread the film and they will spread it with your name“. This whole concept of freeing your work is about sharing your work to the audience and by doing so, you are reaching towards the audience and hence, audiences will give their support in return by distributing your work or even donating some money.

I think copyright laws needs amendments as they are too restrictive. New talents and creativity are being restricted because they have to pay for their copy of work to be distributed to the audience. It cost way too much money. Fortunately, there are many websites now which supports free sharing and many people actually gain fame from these free sharing websites such as Youtube. I have seen so many ‘Youtube Personalities or Youtube Stars‘ started off sharing their videos as part of broadcasting their talents and their community just started to grow. Once that happens, it caught the attention of corporate sponsors and what not potential film producers and music record companies. My favourite Youtube personalities would be Philip Wang, Wesley Chan and Ted Fu which makes up the wongfuproductions and also Australian born Janice and Sonia better known as Jayesslee. The more famous Youtube personalities which are now in the entertainment industry would be Justin Bieber and the most current, Rebecca Black. What I have written here reflects back on my thoughts on Free Culture and how it has changed the freedom of distributing creative works and how it has been rewarding these people.

These are really new and interesting information for me that it makes me wonder what have I been doing till I wasn’t aware of such issues going on. I have so many tabs open now on Free Culture and copyright questions. I’m documenting this down because I’m really awe-inspired now and I hope I won’t forget about this. From one documentary video, it led me to so many related topics which I didn’t even intend to write on this entry and I probably went off topic but oh well. Now I’m off to watch Sita Sings the Blues.