Vidreview: RiP: A Remix Manifesto

This is a video review on the movie "RiP: A Remix Manifesto" directed by Brett Gaylor. It is a open-sourced documentary film released in 2008. Throughout the movie, it talks about the history and concept of copyright in United States, as well as the world. Additionally, it included different people's opinion toward copyright and the evolution of copyright.

More specifically, the movie includes the following topics which are exclusively interesting to me:

• copyRIGHT vs. copyLEFT
• Fair use vs. copyright
• Digital Rights Management
• Intellectual Property
• Piracy

In able to demonstrate the ideas, the movie uses the examples including:

• Mashup
• Nepster
• Disney
• Girl Talk

Good:

• The movie focused on a following outline. During each point, the movie talks about the cause and effects by listing different examples that demonstrates the situation during the period of time.

1. Culture always builds on the past
2. The past always tries to control the future
3. Our future is becoming less free
4. To build free societies you must limit the controls of the past

• Mouse Liberation Front(Air Pirates) demonstrated the idea of copyright in an ironic way which I thought was amazing. It questions people by asking "If Disney can do it, why can't we?"
• It's very interesting to know that the Happy Birthday song actually has a copyright... This means people who sings the song in any public domain without a permission(from Warner Chappell who owns the copyright) will be charged and is considered to be a crime. This is also another ironic approach to the copyright issue.
• A lawyer suggested to consider the copyright in terms of a "fair use" instead of "stealing" just like how literatures quote each others. Since the line between "fair use" and "stealing" is so blurry, the copyright issue then turns into  a "word game" that nobody can clarify.
• The ends with a strong quote to support its point.

• "If this(remix and equivalent issues) is crime, then we have a whole generation of criminals."

Bads:

• The movie is relatively bias on its points and shows almost no counters on copyLEFT.
• Girl Talk took up a huge portion of the movie - I understand that it's a good example of copyLEFT but it's not necessary to continuously talk about him throughout the entire movie.
• The 4th point of the outline of relatively rough - the movie spent only the last few minutes talking about Creative Comments which it should actually play a huge role in the copyright issues.
• The movie continuously emphasize "copyright is been manipulated for profits" so that the copyright is extremely evil to the audiences - which I believe that's not the only case of why people would protect copyright.
• The movie kind of put remixing and pirating issues on the same line which they're actually different things.

Overall the movie is good to me. Even though it is a bit bias on the copyRIGHT vs. copyLEFT, but at least it's reasonable on proving the copyLEFT side. It is a good movie for people to know and understand the idea of copyLEFT.

The complete movie is linked below:

RiP: A Remix Manifesto