You can find the original italian version of this article in the number 2 of Piratpartiet.it, January 2008. Here is the link to the archive.

A beautiful land in danger
Val di Noto - an unspoiled land in south east Sicily (Italy) – was declared UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002, mainly because it is an outstanding testimony of late Baroque art and architecture. Curiously, just two years after the Sicilian Region consented to Panther Oil, a Texas company, carrying out hydrocarbon searches in the land. The local community immediately stood up for the defense of its land and its local economy: in fact the UNESCO nomination had furthered a lot of touristic and agricultural initiatives, which obviously felt threated by the upcoming drillings.
This fact reached the mainstream media in the June of 2007, thanks to an appeal by Andrea Camilleri, famous writer and creator of Inspector Montalbano, main symbol of Sicily in the modern italian imaginary. The day after this appeal was translated and republished by foreign newspapers such as Times, Guardian and Le Monde. As a result, a week after Panther Oil decided to give up the drillings... but just in 10% of the land.. so it was a bluff, the story continues..stay tuned here: www.notriv.it

What really surprises me is the total absent-mindedness of italian mainstream media with regard to a film documentary, freely distributed over the Internet since June 2006, which gives a deep, poetic and beautiful visual report of this story. And this is really a pity, because the way this film – 13 Variations on a Baroque Theme – was produced, made and distributed, would have deserved much more attention by the big media. It would also have been a good chance to introduce people who have never heard about Free Culture to a new way to produce and distribute a creative work, even a complex and expensive work like a movie.

The audience is the producer
The first peculiar thing about 13 Variations is the fact the producer is not a major studio or a big publishing company but the audience, who sponsored the production of the film by buying the dvd before the project started. The directors – members of the independent studio called Malastrada.film – chose to use Produzioni dal Basso [Production from the base], a web platform that gives artists the tools to launch a project, see the response and interest of the people and possibly obtain the financial support to start it up. In this case, directors asked each co-producer a contribution of 10€, i.e. the cost of the dvd (which they would have received at the end of the production). They managed to reach the number of co-producers defined at the launch of the project just few days before the deadline: 640 persons decided that this film documentary should born, probably motivated by the desire of helping in spreading the word about an urgent issue not enough known outside the Sicily.
The main value of this kind of production is enabling a huge artistic freedom, both in content and in style: if the audience financially supports the author, the author doesn't need to modify its choices to comply with the industry's standards and interests. As it's said in the home of Malastradafilm.com, “To us, the production from the base means bypassing both TV and cinema industries, keeping away from the political and esthetical control of corporations and their images and stories”.

CC license
The second peculiarity regards the copyright license: 13 Variations is one of the first italian movies being distributed with a copyleft/open content license, and precisely a Creative Commons by-nc-nd (the less free of the 6 CC licenses). This license allows users to freely and legally copy and distribute the film, as long as these three conditions are respected: by – giving attribution to the author; nc – do not make commercial uses of the copies; nd – do not modify or create derivative works.
What does it mean? Which are the implications?
Simply put, the copy and sharing of contents over the Internet becomes legal if copyrighted works are licensed with this kind of licenses: the basic freedom of these licenses, in fact, is – at least – granting people the right to copy and distribute the content with non commercial purposes. The consequence is obvious: these licenses create a Free Culture, i.e. a culture which can be accessed by anyone with no difference of status, money or anything (of course you need an Internet connection). But at the same time the license states that author reserves some rights that must be respected.
All CC licenses have the attribution clause (by): this is quite normal, because usually all the artists want to sign their works and be recognized as authors of their works. Then you can choose if you want your work to be used to create derivative works or not: the no derivative clause (nd) forbids the creation of new works from the original one. That's useful both if you want to block any derivative work and if you want to just keep control of derivatives. In fact, if a clause prevents derivatives, this doesn't mean you can't try to contact the author and ask him to grant you the right: maybe if your work is well done, the author could allow your derivative work. Another option is either to give users the freedom to license the derivative work as they like or to force them to license it with the same license of the original work – through the ShareAlike clause (sa): in this way the freedoms become viral – this is indeed what strictly defines a copyleft license in the wider range of open content licenses. Eventually, the non commercial clause (nc) forbids any commercial use of the work. This is the most discussed of the clauses, because its interpretation is sometimes not so easy. Anyway, the function of this clause is basically to keep alive the idea of a commercial exclusive and give the authors the control over it: that is, monstly, avoiding free riders publishers and media companies to make money without paying a royalty.

Copyzero: proving you are the author of a work
All we have said before would be useless if the author is not able to prove that he is actually the creator of a certain work in a certain time. In fact open content licenses are just contracts that state the rights of author and users; in order to be enforced, the ownership of an artwork must be proved somehow. In Italy most of artists register their works in the SIAE database, but this is quite expensive (110€ every 5 years for each work). So far the most economic way was the so-called “poor man's copyright”: the creator sends the work to himself in a sealed envelope by registered mail, using the postmark to establish the date. But, as you can see in the wikipedia page, this tecnique is not recognized by american courts as an alternative to actual registration. Also in Italy this technique seems to be quite uncertain, because of some practical problems (the integrity of envelop and seal, the possibility of counterfeiting).
A part from that, it's obvious that this solution is impractical, especially considering we are living in the digital age. And here it comes the idea of Costozero, an italian association who provides several tools for artists who want to autodetermine the life of their artworks. The most interesting tool is Copyzero:
“Copyzero is a mechanism of protection of works through the use of qualified digital signature and a time mark. This mechanism lies in converting the work into digital format and appending the digital signature (which characterizes the author of the work) and a time mark (which indicates the existence of the work since given time) to the file.
In the Italian legal system, the digital signature has the same probative value as a certificate of SIAE (Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori, Italian society of authors and publishers) but a cost much smaller (0,36 euro, cost of one time mark, rather than corresponding 110 euro for renewal of the certificate every 5 years).” (from Wikipedia)
Malastrada chose to use this innovative tool.

Contents free (as in freedom)
A movie is a complex work made of different contents. In this case we can find three different kinds of content, each linked to a different copyright status.
First of all, we have the directors' (Alessandro Gagliardo, Antonio Longo, Christian Consoli) shot, licensed with a CC By-Nc-Nd license, as we've said before.
Then we have the music. All the soundtrack – a part from a song featuring the sicilian trumpetist Roy Paci, who distributes his works through traditional copyright – is by Lee Maddeford, who distribute most of his music with a CC By-Nc-Sa (more free than the previous license, because it gives users the right to create derivative works). You'll be surprised by the beauty of his songs, and maybe you'll find out that also in the world of Free Culture it's actually possible to find really good stuff. You can listen or download all of his music through the website http://www.leemaddeford.ch

Now I want to focus on the most interesting feature of 13 Variations: the re-use of creative works in the public domain, that is works whose copyright terms are ended. The directors found this free material on the Internet Archive, the huge online library which contains digital media that are either in the public domain or licensed under open content licenses. In 13 Variations we can listen to a public domain music, Swing Low Sweet Chariot, recorded by Southern Four in 1924. Probably we are not used to see/listen the culture of the past come back in the artworks of today, because the recording technologies are relatively recent (therefore most of the first recorded works have been entering the public domain in the very last years). It could seem weird to some of us, but it is a charming idea and a great possibility for artists.
This becomes clear if we consider the use Malastrada did of some public domain videos in this movie. All videos, taken from archive.org, were financed by oil companies to hype their products and promote their corporate image: Oil for Alladin's lamp (1949) produced by Shell, American Frontier (1953) and Crossroad USA (1952) produced by the American Petroleum Institute and eventually Progress Parade (1960), an orphan work. The directors used all this material in a very smart way, and mostly with satiric purpose, and therefore have proved the importance of one of the main arguments of those who fight against the extension of copyright terms: if the horizon of the public domain – that is, when copyright expires and the owner of the rights loses his power of exclusive over a certain work – continues being pushed away over and over, not only this situation benefits just publishers, but it also harms the audience and new artists. It harms the audience/readers, beacuse works protected by a age-hold copyright enter very late both in competitive markets – where prices are low – and in free digital libraries (such as archive.org) – where the access is free of charge and available to anyone in the world with an Internet connection. It harms the artists too, because creative people use to adapt and trasform what previous artists have invented. In 13 Variations, the cool counterpoint between the images of today and the ones of the past aims to be ironic: obviously, oil companies would not like this use. Unfortunately (for them), the freedom of expression allows to quote others' ideas and rebuild it in a new context to transform it and make mokery of them.
In the dvd extras there is also a cartoon, Destination Earth (1956), produced again by the American Petroleum Institute and in the public domain. It's a propaganda cartoon, which hyped the advantages of oil and cars without considering the enormous collateral effects. If we watch this cartoon with the eyes of today, we could laugh and find it funny; but it should be also the chance to finally learn that what today is called progress should be evaluated in the long run and taking into account problems as well as benefits of it. I guess this was one of the main purposes of the directors in using that material.

A neverending copyright: cui prodest?
A final consideration: if Malastrada could use these public domain movies, this is because in the 50s/60s american copyright last for 28 or 56 years after the death of the author. Today copyright – with some slight differences in each country – lasts 75 years after the death of author: that is, usually a century, more or less. So in the future new artists will have to wait for much more time before they could freely reuse the works of the past in new works. And readers as well will have to wait much more time to get free access to the culture of the past. So who profits of a copyright lasting more than a century?