There’s a screening tonight at SILVERDOCS of Brett Gaylor’s RiP: A Remix Manifesto, and another on Saturday night. It’s a must see film, and you should try to get out to the festival to check it out, but don’t sweat it if you can’t make it. You can always just download it. No need to go combing through torrent sites looking for a decent copy, though. You can download it directly from the filmmaker. If you want to pay him, great. You name the price. If not? That’s cool, too. And if you want to re-cut his footage and post your edit online, or contribute original material to next year’s planned 2.0 release, go right ahead. All of this is the point of the film: creativity, ideas, and media need not be controlled by the few; it belongs to us all. And copyright law needs to be rebuilt so that it serves its original purpose: to encourage creativity, not restrict it.

But a documentary about copyright law must be awfully dull, no? Taking his cues from remix artist Girl Talk, who is also a primary subject of the film, Gaylor treats the whole movie like a huge remix project. And as anyone who’s ever been to a Girl Talk show knows (see picture above), dude knows how to throw a party. In the same style, RiP feels like a dance party of ideas, a reconfiguration of the way we think about the entire concept of “ownership”, set to a defiant, yet celebratory and optimistic, beat.