RiP: A Remix Manifesto @ SILVERDOCS

Girl Talk proves the perfect springboard for Gaylor's discussion. As an artist, his work is comprised almost entirely of the repurposed work of others. In one segment, Gaylor demonstrates how to actually go to the music labels and publishing companies to clear all the samples in one GT album (sometimes up to nearly two dozen per song), it would cost over four million dollars. His entire career is a case study in the limits copyright law places on artistry. And in his other, day-job incarnation, he's Greg Gillis, biomedical engineer, another field in which advancement is hampered by copyright. Researchers aren't encouraged to share ideas so that life-threatening illnesses can be cured by the sum total of the best minds in the world working together. Rather, ideas are closely guarded by companies looking to make the most money they can on the research of a small percentage of these minds working in seclusion from one another. Gaylor makes the argument that copyright restrictions aren't just limiting our art and entertainment: it can be a matter of life and death.

As one might expect from a director committed to remix as an art form, the film is meticulously organized and skillfully paced. Using a simple four part manifesto as his starting point, he sets out to illustrate and argue each point one by one. Along the way he shows how the art of remix goes back much farther than recorded music, how Walt Disney was one of the most astute practitioners of remix (basing most of his feature films on old fairy tales, and using popular live-action films as the basis for many of his early shorts) before becoming one of the biggest lobbyists for increased copyright restrictions, and how the U.S. used a willful ignorance of international copyright law to its economic advantage early in our history before becoming powerful enough to try to dictate such laws to the rest of the world. The delivery throughout is humorous, but never preachy, and always on point.

In addition to Girl Talk, Gaylor gets a big assist from Stanford Law professor, and one of the founders of Creative Commons, Laurence Lessig. In fact, borrowing (or remixing?) a trick from Al Gore, Gaylor uses a lecture and power-point presentation of Lessig's as basis for a big chunk of the movie. Interviews with some of the creators and enforcers of recent U.S. copyright law provide some of the opposing points, as well as a telling Charlie Rose clip of Metallica's Lars Ulrich arguing the point with Public Enemy's Chuck D, in which Ulrich uses the word "control" about a dozen times.

At the risk of sounding less like a critic and more like a booster, RiP has the potential to become an Important Film. It's hard to leave the theater and not feel inspired to advocacy. It comes at a pivotal time in history, as lawmakers wrestle with how to address the issue of copyright in a world where information of all kinds can be easily digitized and shared, a world suddenly made a great deal smaller by the internet. As this connectivity provides not just greater access to information, but initiates entirely new forms of creativity, it necessitates a radical shift in thinking. Gaylor shows us a glimpse of what that world can look like on the creative scale via Girl Talk and other acts like Negativland, and on a broader, societal scale via a look at Brazil, which has become a world leader in copyright progressivism. His arguments are simple without being condescending, straightforward appeals to common sense. If everyone in this country watched this film, it's difficult to imagine there not being a sea change in the way this country treats this issue on a local and a global scale. It's that convincing. And, since the film is open source and available to anyone, it's easy to show to other people, so you're encouraged to get as many people as possible to watch it. After all, in the 21st century, we're all distributors.