RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Tue 05 Jan 2010, 8:00pm

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Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor’s feature documentary RiP: A remix manifesto explores the concept of copyright in the era of Napster, Bit Torrent and peer-to-peer file sharing. Although pop culture giants such as Muddy Waters and the Rolling Stones were able to build on past music to produce their own, the door is now closing behind them. RiP’s central protagonist iis Gregg Gillis, the Pittsburgh biomedical engineer who moonlights as Girl Talk, a mash-up artist rearranging the pop charts’ DNA with his incongruous, entirely samplebased songs. But is Girl Talk a paragon of people power or the Pied Piper of piracy?

A mash-up in itself, RiP shatters the wall between users and producers and challenges the thresholds of “fair use”.

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Digital technology opens up an unprecedented global economy of ideas.RiP explores the robber barons and revolutionaries squaring off acrossthis new frontier as the film journeys from the control rooms ofWashington to the favelas of Brazil. Along the way, Gaylor interviews key figuresabout the complexities of intellectual property in the digital era,among them Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, culture critic Cory Doctorow, Brazilian musician andformer Minister of Cultural Affairs Gilberto Gil, and Jammie Thomas,the single mom successfully sued by the Recording Industry Association of America for illegal downloading.

A mash-up in itself, RiP is the world’s first Open Source documentary,shattering the wall between users and producers and challenging thethresholds of “fair use”. Brett shares his raw footage atwww.opensourcecinema.org, for anyone to remix. RiP’s movie-as-mash-upmethod allowed these remixes to become an integral part of the film.With RiP: A remix manifesto, Gaylor and Girl Talk sound an urgent alarmand draw the lines of battle. Which side of the ideas war are you on?