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Editorial Reviews
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About as edgy and fascinating a glimpse you ll get into one of the more pressing issues of our Internet Age. --Montreal Gazette
When it comes to remix culture, copyfight and crowd-sourcing, Brett Gaylor walks the walk. --Wired
When it comes to remix culture, copyfight and crowd-sourcing, Brett Gaylor walks the walk. --Wired
Product Description
In RiP: A Remix Manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
The film s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.
Which side of the ideas war are you on?
The film s central protagonist is Girl Talk, a mash-up musician topping the charts with his sample-based songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy? Creative Commons founder, Lawrence Lessig, Brazil s Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow are also along for the ride.
A participatory media experiment, from day one, Brett shares his raw footage at opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. This movie-as-mash-up method allows these remixes to become an integral part of the film. With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarm and draw the lines of battle.
Which side of the ideas war are you on?
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
An essential battle, though Girl Talk did not go beyond his boxer's shorts
October 11, 2010
Format:DVD
This is an essential film for our modern age and all children, from 7 to 77 or even 107 should be obliged to view it, learn it and memorize it. But before discussing the core of the film, that is to say remixing, mash-up if you want, girl-talk if you prefer, let's get rid of a few misconceptions.
First, patents and copyright are not the same thing. Patents are a scandal because they are based on a lie. They are supposed to cover the research expenses of an invention and as such should not be counted in years but should be strictly limited to the amount of expenses concerned by the said invention. If PharmaXXX declares to have spent two million dollars on the research to produce that new drug (and that can easily be checked by any tax inspector who knows his job and is not corrupted), it should be authorized to overcharge the customers by let's say 25% till those two millions, or if you want to be generous and think of encouraging the poor PharmaXXX, 2.5 millions, and then bye-bye excessive profit, the 25% overcharge is out and the protection falls.
Second, ideas are not protected, I repeat ideas are not protected. Molecules cannot be protected because they are no one's property. Should we protect oxygen as the property of Mr. Dupont de Nemours? To go back to art, ideas cannot be protected, but characters are and the form these ideas are expressed in are too.
Third, the film deals with the fundamentalist aspect of copyright in Northern America. I used "fundamentalist" because it is pure industrial terrorism that has nothing to do with intellectual property since these corporations never invented these characters, musics, videos, films, etc. They have at best produced them and have to be compensated for their productive activity, but not for the invention and creation of these artistic works.
Fourth, we are not dealing first in this film with illegal downloading which is a completely different business. Mash-up artists do not need to be using illegally downloaded works. Mash-up artists can, and should, use legally downloaded and bought works. And what I am going to say now is within that frame of thinking. I do not in any way accept the appropriation of any merchandise, be it oranges or bread, without paying the proper price for it. Shoplifting is a funny sport but a shoplifter knows exactly what the risk he is running into is. And I know from direct experience.
That leads me to Lessig and his battle and this time I will move to France, and France is not the only case. Disc Jockeys had a fight with the SACEM (the civil society that collects author's rights for music) to be recognized as creators, as composers of their own. And they were. Their instantaneous compositions with already recorded works that are not of their own are considered as works of their own and they are the authors or composers of these mixed works. The new element is that instead of using old vinyl records and simple turntables and some sound processing consoles, mash-up artists today use digital samplers and digital sound processing machines. There is a battle to fight there and Lessig is right. This is a creative act of its own and it should be permitted in the name of fair use first, because it is really creating an art of its own or making a point of its own (including at the end of the film a satirical pastiche which is authorized by fair use). The artist who does it should be recognized the quality of composer or creator of any type because he is really creating something new with what was not at all of the same type. I don't see how it could even be called plagiarism. In France since jurisprudence, as far as I know, considers that you need a sequence of eight identical notes (in one sequence I said) for it to be called plagiarism, mash-up works cannot be plagiarized works. If it is not plagiarism, then it is creative.
Two battles remain to be fought. First the battle against illegal downloading because it is piracy and it is stealing. Then the battle for the recognition of the creative act of any person who is mixing up, mashing up works that are available on any medium. Then let courts decide, if necessary, where the limit between remixing and just copying is. One example: in a textbook I am told that when you get over fifteen lines of collected quotations of one work you have to pay 300 euros. I think that is both silly and counterproductive. The author (if he can have his own say) and the publisher should probably negotiate some kind of highlighting for the concerned work as a promotional deal. But merchants are too often the worst commercial agents of their own goods. They sound like fathers trying to marry their daughters in a heavily patriarchal country. Which is quite old-fashioned and past-minded.
This video then is an essential tool but it requires some good background knowledge. For instance the first text about copyright is not the Statute of Anne in 1710, but the Stationers Company Charter in 1557. The Statute of Anne just shifted the copyright from the printer to the author and introduced a time limit on it. Then the film should have checked the American background: copyright and patents are in the same clause of the US Constitution (1787), not in 1776 (the Declaration of Independence?) but then they are instated by two separate laws, the copyright one in 1791 like the Bill of Rights. By being constitutional it cannot be negated expect by a constitutional amendment or by a US Supreme Court decision, which could only deal with details, not the principle.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
First, patents and copyright are not the same thing. Patents are a scandal because they are based on a lie. They are supposed to cover the research expenses of an invention and as such should not be counted in years but should be strictly limited to the amount of expenses concerned by the said invention. If PharmaXXX declares to have spent two million dollars on the research to produce that new drug (and that can easily be checked by any tax inspector who knows his job and is not corrupted), it should be authorized to overcharge the customers by let's say 25% till those two millions, or if you want to be generous and think of encouraging the poor PharmaXXX, 2.5 millions, and then bye-bye excessive profit, the 25% overcharge is out and the protection falls.
Second, ideas are not protected, I repeat ideas are not protected. Molecules cannot be protected because they are no one's property. Should we protect oxygen as the property of Mr. Dupont de Nemours? To go back to art, ideas cannot be protected, but characters are and the form these ideas are expressed in are too.
Third, the film deals with the fundamentalist aspect of copyright in Northern America. I used "fundamentalist" because it is pure industrial terrorism that has nothing to do with intellectual property since these corporations never invented these characters, musics, videos, films, etc. They have at best produced them and have to be compensated for their productive activity, but not for the invention and creation of these artistic works.
Fourth, we are not dealing first in this film with illegal downloading which is a completely different business. Mash-up artists do not need to be using illegally downloaded works. Mash-up artists can, and should, use legally downloaded and bought works. And what I am going to say now is within that frame of thinking. I do not in any way accept the appropriation of any merchandise, be it oranges or bread, without paying the proper price for it. Shoplifting is a funny sport but a shoplifter knows exactly what the risk he is running into is. And I know from direct experience.
That leads me to Lessig and his battle and this time I will move to France, and France is not the only case. Disc Jockeys had a fight with the SACEM (the civil society that collects author's rights for music) to be recognized as creators, as composers of their own. And they were. Their instantaneous compositions with already recorded works that are not of their own are considered as works of their own and they are the authors or composers of these mixed works. The new element is that instead of using old vinyl records and simple turntables and some sound processing consoles, mash-up artists today use digital samplers and digital sound processing machines. There is a battle to fight there and Lessig is right. This is a creative act of its own and it should be permitted in the name of fair use first, because it is really creating an art of its own or making a point of its own (including at the end of the film a satirical pastiche which is authorized by fair use). The artist who does it should be recognized the quality of composer or creator of any type because he is really creating something new with what was not at all of the same type. I don't see how it could even be called plagiarism. In France since jurisprudence, as far as I know, considers that you need a sequence of eight identical notes (in one sequence I said) for it to be called plagiarism, mash-up works cannot be plagiarized works. If it is not plagiarism, then it is creative.
Two battles remain to be fought. First the battle against illegal downloading because it is piracy and it is stealing. Then the battle for the recognition of the creative act of any person who is mixing up, mashing up works that are available on any medium. Then let courts decide, if necessary, where the limit between remixing and just copying is. One example: in a textbook I am told that when you get over fifteen lines of collected quotations of one work you have to pay 300 euros. I think that is both silly and counterproductive. The author (if he can have his own say) and the publisher should probably negotiate some kind of highlighting for the concerned work as a promotional deal. But merchants are too often the worst commercial agents of their own goods. They sound like fathers trying to marry their daughters in a heavily patriarchal country. Which is quite old-fashioned and past-minded.
This video then is an essential tool but it requires some good background knowledge. For instance the first text about copyright is not the Statute of Anne in 1710, but the Stationers Company Charter in 1557. The Statute of Anne just shifted the copyright from the printer to the author and introduced a time limit on it. Then the film should have checked the American background: copyright and patents are in the same clause of the US Constitution (1787), not in 1776 (the Declaration of Independence?) but then they are instated by two separate laws, the copyright one in 1791 like the Bill of Rights. By being constitutional it cannot be negated expect by a constitutional amendment or by a US Supreme Court decision, which could only deal with details, not the principle.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
By CZ
Format:DVD
I found this video to be thought-provoking and entertaining. While it lacks discussion about the need to compensate an artist for their work (indeed, a drawback), it makes a valid and socially important point: It's unhealthy and uninteresting to control creativity, the source of creativity, and the building-blocks of a creative work (i.e., visual or music samples). Current art often does build on the past, even when it believes itself to be 'original'.
This film does not answer any questions for me, instead I feel it could be a catalyst for a much needed and very important discussion that the US Public needs to have among ourselves: Get introspective. Look at our laws. Look at big business. How did we get here? How is it convenient? How is it killing our culture? And what steps do we need to take individually and collectively to breed a culture that nurtures (and financially compensates) creativity?
This I'd really like to know: How do we honor and compensate artists and their creative pursuits AND still leave the door open for remix culture to flourish and possibly generate entirely new art-forms?
A monoculture is weak - and no fun at all.
This film does not answer any questions for me, instead I feel it could be a catalyst for a much needed and very important discussion that the US Public needs to have among ourselves: Get introspective. Look at our laws. Look at big business. How did we get here? How is it convenient? How is it killing our culture? And what steps do we need to take individually and collectively to breed a culture that nurtures (and financially compensates) creativity?
This I'd really like to know: How do we honor and compensate artists and their creative pursuits AND still leave the door open for remix culture to flourish and possibly generate entirely new art-forms?
A monoculture is weak - and no fun at all.
0 of 5 people found the following review helpful
By Stephen
Format:DVD
The arguments in this documentary make no logical sense. You will waste 90 minutes watching it. The hero of this film, Girl Talk, is a BRILLIANT mash-up DJ. It wouldn't make sense for him to make and sell CD's because of the amount of prerecorded music he's using. He can make millions touring the globe and packing out venues doing his thing as a DJ - so what's the complaint? What's even more frustrating is when the filmmaker sits down with the Registrar of Copyrights and plays a clip of Girl Talk. What he chooses to show her is a clip where Girl Talk cuts up ONE CHORD of an Elvis Costello song to where it doesn't sound remotely like the song. This is nothing like the typical Girl Talk mash-up, and I think Elvis would say, "good on ya", no lawsuit. And what's the argument with Walt Disney? He took stories that already existed and turned them into great story telling, with great characters. So you're complaining now because you can't take Disney's versions of the characters? This film is 90 minutes of whining because you can't make money off the sweat of other people's backs. It's a lazy man's manifesto for those who want to cut and paste other people's labors, call it their own and collect a paycheck.
