TALK TO THE HAND Paley’s had it up to here with copyright laws.

Nina Paley didn’t set out to be an anti-copyright activist. She just wanted to make an animated film. The battle over unfair copyright laws and exorbitant fees for music rights came later.

The seeds of Paley’s charming Sita Sings the Blues were planted as her marriage was coming apart. Her husband took a job in India and communication rapidly broke down. Paley, a cartoonist with a solid reputation in the underground comics scene, moved to India to be with him, but things weren’t going well.

She started work on a comic book, using her laptop with a tablet attachment. “The easiest way for me to do the characters was to just draw them in Flash,” explains Paley, whom we spoke to by phone. “I thought at the most these would just be illustrations. Then I thought, well, it won’t take much to move them around. I just kept playing with them.”

With disarming casualness, Paley recalls what happened next: “Then when I got to New York, you know, my husband dumped me by e-mail, and I heard Annette Hanshaw for the first time. Various things changed and I thought, I would like to do a short film with the Annette Hanshaw songs.”

At the same time, Paley became fascinated with the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic. She was especially drawn to the story of Sita, Rama’s wife, the quintessential woman done wrong. She’s kidnapped by a man who lusts after her. Rama saves her but then refuses to take her back because he can’t be sure she hasn’t been “defiled.” He’s convinced of her virtue by an actual trial by fire and takes her back, only to banish her when he finds that his people don’t respect him because they doubt her purity.

Paley made a jaunty short, in which an animated Sita, who looks strikingly like Betty Boop, lip-synchs to a Hanshaw recording of the torch song “Mean to Me.” Paley got a lot of positive feedback, which led her to plunge into the more ambitious project of making a feature-length film that would simultaneously tell the story of Sita and of Paley’s own breakup.

Everything looked good until she tried to secure the rights to the music. Hanshaw’s recordings are in the public domain, but the songs are covered under copyright law even though they are all more than 80 years old. Paley found that to be legal, she’d have to pay more than the cost of the entire film.

To be blunt, that pissed Paley off. She negotiated better terms with the companies that own the rights, but she’s still severely constrained by law. So she and her lawyers have come up with a novel distribution scheme. You can download the film for free (go to sitasingstheblues.com for links). The copyright holders might still argue that she’s “selling” the work at a price of $0, so her website notes that your downloaded copy is “promotional,” which in theory makes it legal. So far, none of the copyright holders have moved against her, but the whole insane situation has made Paley into a convert to the Free Culture movement, which argues that copyright law inhibits the arts.

Why would companies care about these old songs? As Paley notes on her website, “There’s so much old good music that people would be listening to now. But if people listened to it, what would they do with the new stuff? If culture were freer, it would compete with people’s time in consuming new stuff.” And Paley has put her money (or the lack thereof) where her mouth is. The only money she’s seeing from the film is for limited special editions (legal under the rights contracts she negotiated) and donations. “My first concern is Art, and Art has no life if people can’t share it.”

Sita Sings the Blues opens Friday.

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