Today’s digital technologies give individuals the ability to
engage with culture in a way that has never before been possible. No
longer confined to the role of passive consumers of culture,
individuals are embracing the opportunity to participate in a
continuing process of cultural creation and dialogue. Armed with an
internet connection and easily obtainable software, music fans are
creating songs called mashups that combine pieces of two or more
existing songs into a new work that is both familiar and different. Fan
fiction, a literary genre in which people write new adventures for
their favourite fictional characters, is flourishing in the digital
era. Machinimators create original films within the worlds of video
games. Inexpensive software has led to an explosion in the popularity
of digital collage.
These new art forms, all examples of remix culture, have come in
conflict with Canadian copyright laws. It’s arguable that these forms
of creativity infringe copyright law as it currently exists in Canada.
Seeking to protect what they interpret to be their rights, some
copyright owners have suppressed the works of remixers. Mashup artists,
fan fiction writers, machinimators and creators of digital collage
create their works with the knowledge that they may someday face a
lawsuit for copyright infringement.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto—premiering Wednesday at the
ViewFinders International Film Festival for Youth—is a documentary by
Canadian filmmaker and web activist Brett Gaylor. It explores the
tension between copyright and remix culture. The main protagonists in
RiP are four individuals who are prominent in the current
copyright debates: Girl Talk, a mashup artist whose latest album,
Feed The Animals, stitches together 322 songs in 54 minutes of
music; Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, who is the
“coolest lawyer in the world” and a well-known advocate of remix
culture; Cory Doctorow, a Canadian technology activist, blogger and
science fiction novelist; and Gilberto Gil, musician, songwriter and
formerly Brazil’s minister of culture.
Gaylor describes these individuals as “defenders of the public
domain;” individuals who believe that the public domain (roughly
defined as a space free from copyright protection) must be protected to
ensure the future of art, culture and creativity. With help from these
“defenders of the public domain,” Gaylor traces the history of
copyright from Gutenberg to Napster and beyond to show how corporate
interests have hijacked copyright from its original purpose of
providing incentives for artists to create works, to the detriment of
society. His main argument is that a healthy public domain is essential
to creativity, and that the public domain, as it exists today, is
impoverished due to restrictive copyright laws and the actions of
content owners.
He doesn’t just speak of remix in the abstract. RiP is the
world’s first open source documentary, a living, breathing example of
remix culture. During the film’s development, Gaylor shared raw footage
on Open Source Cinema, his collaborative website where filmmakers can
share media, remix scenes and work together on films. Gaylor continues
to encourage fans to take the documentary, remix it, remake it and, in
so doing, participate in RiP‘s ongoing reinvention. Many of
these uploaded remixes, including an animated version of the film, have
been incorporated into the latest version of RiP.
The documentary’s release is particularly well timed. The federal
government has indicated that it intends to introduce new legislation
to amend the Copyright Act. Concerns have been raised that the proposed
legislation will further restrict the rights of users to remix
copyright-protected content. In RiP, Gaylor warns of the dangers
of living in a world in which the past controls the future. He shows
the promise of a world in which everyone can participate in the
continuous reinvention of culture, and everyone can create the future
by building on the past. A world where everyone can remix.
RiP: A Remix Manifesto‘s
French-language screening, Wednesday, April 22 at Empire Bayers Lake 9,
10:20am, $6. English-language screening, Friday, April 24 at the Oxford
Theatre, 10am, $6, viewfinders.bside.com.
This article appears in Apr 16-22, 2009.
