QuestionCopyright.org

» see questioncopyright.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

In the internet cafes I spent time in around 2002, copying was not a position anybody held. It was how files moved. You paid for the hour, somebody had a folder of mp3s, and the question of what the law in another country thought about that never came up. The American free-culture argument, when it eventually reached me, read like a dispatch from a place where the copying was contested enough to need a defense.

QuestionCopyright.org was incorporated in California on 7 February 2007 to run that defense, founded by Karl Fogel, a Subversion developer best known for writing the book on how to run a free software project. The first board meeting was held that August in San Francisco with five directors around the table and Karen Sandler doing the legal work. The slogan, still on the site today, is "when copying is outlawed, only outlaws will have culture".

The organization's bet was that argument loses to demonstration. Rather than filing briefs, it funded and promoted work that was given away deliberately and then tracked what happened to the artist. That produced a run of short animations it called Minute Memes, the best known of which, "Copying Is Not Theft", went up in December 2009 with animation by Nina Paley, a score by Nik Phelps and a vocal by Connie Champagne. It runs barely a minute and makes its entire case in a children's rhyme.

Fogel announced the wind-down on 18 December 2023 in a post whose title tells you what he cared about: the nonprofit was closing, the site was not. The reason was administrative. "The overhead of managing the finances, filing a non-profit tax return every year, and so on, has gotten to be too much", he wrote, adding that he was busy co-running a free software company. The board agreed to split the remaining assets between Nina Paley, the organization's artist in residence, and a few other causes.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the sita experiment ~

The project that justified everything else was Sita Sings the Blues, Nina Paley's animated feature about the Ramayana and her own divorce, which spent years stuck behind the licensing cost of 1920s jazz recordings. In early 2009 it was released free, under a license that let anyone copy or sell it, and QuestionCopyright ran the distribution experiment around it under the name the Sita Distribution Project. The claim being tested was narrow and checkable: that an artist who gives the work away can still eat.

Out of that came the Creator-Endorsed Mark, a small trademark a distributor could display to say that the artist approved of this particular copy and was getting a share. It was an attempt to replace legal exclusivity with a social signal, and to let buyers choose the version that paid the person who made it. It never became common. The idea behind it, that the thing worth protecting is the relationship rather than the copy, turns up constantly now in artist funding platforms that have never heard of it.

~ what the paperwork does ~

The closing notice is a useful document for anyone thinking about incorporating something. A 501(c)(3) is not a mailing list with a mission statement. It is a corporation with a board, minutes, a federal tax return every year and a state registration to keep current, and all of that has to be done by somebody whether or not anything else is happening. The public record shows the last Form 990-EZ filed for the 2020 tax year, so the paperwork outlived the activity by a while before Fogel called it.

The organization's own numbers were never large. One PO box in Stanford, one EIN, a California corporation number, a board that met and recorded its minutes in public. What it had instead of money was a small set of artifacts that traveled a great deal further than its budget.

~ the missing page ~

The site is still there, as promised, and it is now a flat export of the old WordPress install with file names like index.html%3Fp=28.html. The homepage carries no notice at all. A visitor arriving today finds a working free-culture website with its arguments intact and no indication that the organization behind it stopped existing. The only hint sits in the sidebar, where the newest entry in the recent-posts list is the closing announcement itself.

Click that link and you get a 404. The flattening dropped the post that explained the flattening, so the announcement survives only in the Internet Archive, on a site whose own emergency library QuestionCopyright had publicly supported in 2020.

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