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Sita vs Netflix

By Posted by Alan Wexelblat

Back in January of last year I wrote about the indie film Sita Sings The Blues, which had gotten tangled up in some hairy ridiculous amount of copyright snarl. Since then the film's maker Nina Paley has gone on to settle most of her copyright troubles, line up major distribution (despite copylefting the film itself) and generally enjoy what I'd say is the happy ending kind of possible in the current Copyright War regime.

Now she's written a blog post about why you can't get Sita via Netflix. It comes down to DRM. She wants her movie distributed DRM-free and Netflix won't make an exception, even for her free movie. Netflix also won't make a policy exception to let her insert a message before the movie pointing to where people can get it for free. So it won't appear on Netflix and Paley will pass up the revenue she'd get from the distribution deal. Just another brick in the wall.

(Oh, and she takes a swipe at the "everything-DRM" iPad so you might want not to read that, iPad lovers. Actually, I'm sure I've ticked them all off and they're not reading this blog anymore, but you know just in case I figured I'd give fair warning.)

Full post as published by Copyfight - The Politics of IP on April 26, 2010 (boomark / email).