Movie Review: RiP A Remix Manifesto
Brett Gaylor Writes, Directs National Film Board, EyeSteelFilm
Mar 12, 2009
Who really owns ideas, and how long should they hold them? When does Fair Use become Theft and vice versa?
Those are the question raised in Brett Gaylor's documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a call to arms for those who think copyright holders have become too aggressive about protecting their intellectual property.
However, it's not just the RIAA criminalizing teens, independent animators, single mothers and religious figures in the fight against music piracy, it's over-patenting killing research for treatments against disease.
As sample-pop star Girl Talk (AKA former biomedical engineer Greg Gillis) says, "We found in doing research that we can't pursue certain ideas because they might infringe patents held by other companies. We could be on the brink of a cure for cancer or whatever, but we can't do anything because of these copyright laws."
Brett Gaylor Writes, Directs A Remix Manifesto
As you might imagine from the title or his EyeSteelFilm moniker (say it 5 times really fast), Gaylor doesn't pretend to be neutral: he believes that current copyright laws, especially those passed in the US over the last 15 years, are too draconian and destroy the very creativity that they claim to nurture.
By combining documentary footage with interviews with Girl Talk, Creative Commons founder and Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, BoingBoing founder Cory Doctorow and Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil, Gaylor proclaims sampling and remixing as a natural extension of human creativity. In his film, he identifies 2 major groups: the Copy Right (those who feel that "ideas are intellectual property, locked up until purchase") and the Copy Left, who say the "Public Domain must be defended to ensure the free exchange of ideas."
Here are the 4 points of the remixer's manifesto:
- Culture always builds on the past: Whether it was composer/piano virtuoso Franz Liszt using Gypsy melodies in his compositions, Metallica borrowing song structures from Diamond Head or The Rolling Stones recording Robert Johnson's "Love in Vain" as a "traditional, arranged by Keith Richards," composers have always used previous works as inspiration for their own pieces. Gaylor even identifies Walt Disney - whose company is now among the most aggressive of copyright holders - as an inveterate remixer.
- The past always tries to control the future: "Since the Internet came along, the entertainment lobby of the USA has pushed the government towards tougher laws leading to lawsuits being filed against more than 24,000 American citizens." Corporations have limited the free exchange of ideas in order to increase their profits. Whether it's patenting forms of life or intellectual concepts, these attempts to gain control and ownership over ideas has actually worked against humanity's best interest.
- Our future is becoming less free: "The whole world is stuck making criminals out of its citizens to enforce laws that can't be enforced." Copyright laws were originally placed to protect artists and to allow the exchange of ideas in the public domain. However, copyrights that span for a lifetime plus 70 years demonstrate how these laws only protect holders, not creators, and limit what's available to the public domain.
- To build free societies you must limit the control of the past: In 2001, Brazil was forced to invoke their controversial Article 71 – that allows the government to authorize a local company to make a generic copy of a patented drug without the permission of the patent holder – in order to make anti-AIDS drugs available to its citizens, and at a lower rate. "Remixing the art, science and knowledge of the world's culture is second nature to Brazilians and now it's government policy," says Gaylor.
The Final Analysis
Whether you agree or disagree with RiP: A Remix Manifesto, it raises disturbing questions about the ownership of intellectual property versus the free exchange of ideas. It's continually engaging, delivering its message with quick cuts and a dry wit.
As the Information Age becomes less a media construct and more a reality, the notion of who owns what and why becomes an issue that everyone in the world must face. That's why this film needs to be seen, in order to ferment discussion over how ideas should be exchanged in the Internet Age.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto gets a 7/10.
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