Sita (and Nina Paley) sing the blues over copyright

Nina Paley's got a beautiful and sad story to tell. She's made a Flash-based movie called "Sita Sings The Blues," which tells the story of Sita (the Hindu goddess who was the long-suffering wife of Rama, but you knew that). The beauty part is how she tells it -- button-cute and clever animations coupled with the songs of winsome 20s chanteuse Annette Hanshaw, who sounds a little like Betty Boop (that is, singers Mae Questal and Helen Kane) to our modern ears. The sad part is that the movie tells a parallel story of how our writer-director got dumped by her husband (by e-mail) after he moved to India, which is sort of exactly what happened to Sita. Beauty, sadness, the two eternal truths -- right?

Sadly, no. Ms. Paley is discovering that copyright, too, is eternal, and apparently more powerful than either of the other two players. Her film's doing brilliantly on the festival circuit... and thanks to certain insanities of copyright law, she's simply not able to afford to have the movie seen in such festivals, let alone on a DVD near you. The money from "festival rights" fees, "Errors and Omissions Insurance" and the like would go to publishers and estates who had nothing to do with Miss Hanshaw's work and certainly haven't been as diligent and creative in their efforts to popularize it as Nina Paley. Ms. Paley is, to say the absolute least, dismayed -- and running out of options.

So here is a case of copyright that pretty much defines which side of the cultural divide you're on. If you're like me, you're disgusted about copyright rules that in theory benefit creative folk -- after all, the composers of the works were creators too -- but in fact work only for Hollywood giants who don't feel the impact of fees that'll flatten an independent artist. If you're not... well, your definition of the free market is one that doesn't allow for much freedom at all.