The Open v. Closed Culture Smackdown

Nina Paley and Jaron Lanier are fac­ing off in a friend­ly, pub­lic radio smack­down, debat­ing the pros and cons of open/free cul­ture. (Lis­ten to the audio below). As a quick refresh­er, Nina Paley got a good amount of press last year when she cre­at­ed Sita Sings the Blues, a prize-win­ning ani­mat­ed film, and then released it to the pub­lic under a Cre­ative Com­mons license. Jaron Lanier, mean­while, is often called the “father of vir­tu­al­i­ty,” and his new book, You Are Not a Gad­get, takes a fair­ly hard­line stance against Web 2.0 and the free/open cul­ture move­ment it engen­dered. And now the debate record­ed by WNYC in NYC:

NOTE: You can find Sita Sings the Blues (and 125 oth­er films) in our col­lec­tion of Free Movies Online.