page_title: Nina Paley
section_title: Free culture activism
hierarchical_section_title: Nina Paley / Free culture activism
caption_attribution_description: English: GLAM camp NYC 2011 - Nina Paley dropped in on Saturday and gave badges to some of the participants, bearing the motif "Copying is not theft!" The character portrayed on the badge bears obvious resemblance to the image of Mickey Mouse, to visually parody Mickey's role as a symbol for the collective attitude of the intellectual property industry towards copying.
context_page_description: Nina Carolyn Paley is an American cartoonist, animator and free culture activist. She was the artist and often the writer of the comic strips Nina's Adventures and Fluff, but most of her recent work has been in animation. She is perhaps best known for creating the animated feature film Sita Sings the Blues, based on the Ramayana, with parallels to her personal life. In 2018, she completed her second animated feature, Seder-Masochism, a retelling of the Book of Exodus as patriarchy emerging from goddess worship.
  Paley distributes much of her work, including Nina’s Adventures, Fluff, and all the original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft licence.
context_section_description: Because of obstacles in clearing the rights to Hanshaw's recordings for the Sita Sings the Blues, Paley took active part in the free culture movement.
  Since 2009 she is an artist-in-residence at the non-profit organization QuestionCopyright.org, which includes running the projects "Minute Memes" and the "Sita Distribution Project". "Minute Memes" is a series of short ("one-minute") video "memes" made by Paley about copyright restrictions and artistic freedom. She wrote and performed the song "Copying Isn't Theft" meant to be freely remixed by other people, with the animated clip issued as Minute Meme #1. Subsequent animations in this series are "All Creative Work Is Derivative", EFF Tribute and "Credit is Due: The Attribution Song". She also wrote "Understanding Free Content", an illustrated guide to the idea of free content.
  In 2010 she started a new comic strip Mimi & Eunice, highlighting intellectual property problems and paradoxes.
  She has published much of her work, including Nina’s Adventures, Fluff, and all original work in Sita Sings The Blues, under a copyleft licence. The website for Sita Sings the Blues includes a wiki where its fans contributed translated subtitles for the DVD of the film.
  Paley won a Public Knowledge IP3 award in 2010 "for her work in intellectual property".
caption: "Copying is not theft!" badge by Paley
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