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Copyright vs. copyfight
RIP: Remix Manifesto explores the legal and |
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 OPEN SOURCE CINÉASTE: Gaylor by MARK SLUTSKY In some corporations’ eyes, you’re probably already a criminal. Ever since Napster, and the wave of peer-to-peer software that followed its success, initiated the global MP3 free-for-all, we’ve all participated in activities that, if they’re not illegal now, will probably be soon. If you’re reading this paper and have never downloaded music illicitly, you’re probably in the minority. The Internet’s ability to disseminate limitless perfect copies of music, movies, text and so on has forever altered our relationship to the law, to the now-floundering music industry and, perhaps, to art in general. The debate, or debates, plural, around copyright, culture and the future of art is the subject of Montreal filmmaker Brett Gaylor’s ambitious new doc RIP: Remix Manifesto. Originally meant to be a film about concert bootleggers and their legacy—“the historical roots of illegal music,” as Gaylor puts it—it turned into a film very much about the here and now. Using celebrated mash-up artist and party animal Girl Talk as both exemplar and guide through the labyrinths of copyright and “copyfight,” Gaylor uses concert footage, animation, multimedia collages and interviews with outspoken thinkers like Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow and lawyer Lawrence Lessig to illuminate both the nuances of the debate over copyright law and how it impacts art, science and life in the 21st century and beyond. Illegal art“Peer-to-peer file-sharing is 10 years old now, and that’s completely changed everything in the music industry and we’re just sort of now trying to figure out what it means,” Gaylor says. “But it means that everybody has committed copyright infringement at some point in their life, whereas as it used to be that to commit an act of copyright infringement, you had to own a printing press or a television studio or something like that.”
Where it gets really interesting is when the infringement is done in the name of art. Cheap or pirated software and easily sharable media files have seen a flourishing of a kind of creativity that thrives on permutating and re-contextualizing pop songs, movies, news footage—pretty much everything is fair game for mashing up. This has legal implications too: without permission from copyright holders who own the rights to sampled works, art itself can be illegal. To Gaylor, the past should be fair game for artists like Girl Talk, who uses literally hundreds of samples to create surprising new compositions. “You cannot limit access to the past to create new work,” he says, cutting to the core of the manifesto he’s structured the film around. “It just doesn’t work. It’s been proven time and time again that you need that access, you need to stand on the shoulders of giants.” Indeed, as the movie shows, that while the mash-up phenomenon may be new, in many ways, ‘twas ever thus. In an illuminating animated sequence, he shows how a specific musical idea made its way through the decades and into Girl Talk’s set. “The Staples singers had a song called ‘The Last Time,’ and the Stones basically riffed on that to create their ‘The Last Time,’” he says. “Andrew Oldham then did the instrumental of ‘The Last Time,’ which is basically the refrain that you’re familiar with from the Verve and that became ‘Bittersweet Symphony,’ and then Girl Talk takes it one more step and adds the Ying Yang Twins.” Walking the walkTo his credit, Gaylor doesn’t just describe sampling: he does it himself, freely using snippets of copyrighted material to advance his argument—very few of which he’s cleared with the copyright holders, and which could possibly incite their legal wrath. “We are taking a risk, for sure,” he says, citing “fair use” or “fair dealing” as a legal defence. “We had to,” he says. “You gotta walk the walk. I can’t film Girl Talk or Negativland, or be filming these people that are really pushing the boundaries and going for it and then say ‘You can’t actually hear what they’re doing!’” Another way RIP talks the talk is via a concept Gaylor calls Open Source Cinema, a way for everyone to get in on the action. “There was a moment I had reading one of Lessig’s earlier books about how free software projects were made, and just this idea that a product would be made better with the more amount of eyes on it. I think that’s true of democracy—it’s better under bright lights and it’s a model that really works for software. I thought, what if you did try and do something like that with a movie?” To that end, Gaylor started a website (www.opensourcecinema.org) where he posted his rushes and invited users to remix it any way they pleased. Some of the footage he got in return made it into the film. “There was a lot of call-and-response that would happen, and I would edit it in when it was appropriate,” he says. Ultimately, Gaylor sees his film as ever-changing, open to whatever inspiring ideas or contributions might come down the pike: “You could have this version of the film that lives online forever and is always different, just like a Wikipedia entry is not meant to be this static thing. There are limitations to an ever-changing universe that are a bit of a drag, but there are some beautiful opportunities too.”
RIP: REMIX MANIFESTO SCREENS
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