EDIT THIS POST (a review of RiP! A Remix Manifesto for Sept. 14)

Copyright has been on my mind lately, as I'm sure you know, from my comments surrounding the intellectual property issues I saw with Post Secret, as written about on this blog and in class. So when I logged onto Hulu, looking for the newest episode of the world's greatest drinking show, Three Sheets, and was offered a film called RiP! A Remix Manifesto, I figured I had nothing better to do for an hour and 26 minutes. Well, looking back on it, there were plenty of other things I could have done that would have been more worthwhile than watching this film, so, in an effort to derive some sort of benefit from that time not spent playing Xbox, I am writing this review.

I do like, in particular, that the film, having the word manifesto in its subtitle, actually does present a manifesto, first and foremost. It is this:


The one toe in, one toe out nature of the filmmaker's presence in the film kind of bugged me. Get in or get out, my man! I don't need to constantly know that Girl Talk is your favorite musical artist for you to tell me about Girl Talk. The fourth time Gaynor referred to Gregg Gillis this way, I nearly closed the window and gave up.

Somewhere in the middle of the film, the message gets a bit muddled. Gaynor takes up the cause of people sued by the RIAA for downloading songs using the internet. While this is certainly an interesting debate, I feel that Gaynor fell into a common trap for full-length documentaries: only having about 45 minutes worth of argument. Gaynor spends quite a bit of time dealing with these copyright infringers, but never notes that while his whole argument up to this point has been that creation is based on the past and that the past must not be controlled too tightly in order to allow for new things to be created, downloading a song and listening to it does not create anything, except for a fuller playlist on your iPod. There is a large difference between Gregg Gillis cutting up a song to form "the folk art of the future" and someone pirating something because they disagree with the copyright that supposedly protects intellectual property.

The "open source" nature of the film was fairly interesting, with Gaynor clearly marking clips that had been submitted and created by others.

The film ends in Brazil (or Brasil, as I prefer to spell it), where remixing has become a way of life, from DJing classes being taught in communities to keep kids out of favela-based gangs to the national government infringing on a patent in order to produce aids medication cheaply for all of its citizens.

This is the part of the review where I would complain that the film was only preaching to the crowd and will not likely change any copyright rules in America, which the film argues is what must happen to change the way the world thinks about copyright law. The film argues that copyright law has been written by and for by corporations, but doesn't offer any reason why THEY might want to change it. There must be some sort of evidence to show that opening copyright can actually make companies money. The films claims they are just in it for the money, something Disney and Warner and all their pals would probably not deny.

The film credits all samples contained there-in and encourages people to share it and remix it, implying a creative commons copyright that looks little something like this:

Now that I think about it, the film seems to advocate Creative Commons in practice, but only briefly mentions it and espouses a stance closer to CopyRiot.