On Saturday, March 28, 2009, the Ann Arbor Film Festival hosted the second public screening of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a new documentary by Canadian filmmaker Brett Gaylor. Normally I’d put the video trailer at the end, but for those of you who haven’t seen it (or who aren’t familiar with these issues), I’d like you to have a quick crash course in the modern gray area between remix culture and copyright law.

As you can see, the film starts with the controversy surrounding the mash-up artist Girl Talk — real name Greg Gillis — who has been growing in popularity (or notoriety) since the release of his 2006 album Night Ripper. His albums feature hundreds of samples of copyrighted music that Gillis never got permission to use.

Audio: “No Pause” by Girl Talk, from the 2008 album Feed the Animals.

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What’s not seen in the trailer is the four-point manifesto which provides a basic outline for the film. Gaylor calls this “A Remixer’s Manifesto”:

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 control of the past.

The moment I saw this manifesto, I knew it must have been directly inspired by 1984. (Sorry to sound like a skipping record, but clearly Orwell is an important figure in all these issues.) The quote in Orwell’s book: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” It’s such a simple statement, yet it encapsulates so much about the world. You may need to see the film to completely understand what I mean. Another resource I’d suggest is a website I made in grad school called Connected to Creativity. It’s still hosted on my personal website, and it contains a lot of valuable information about how the Internet is fostering incredible creativity, while the current application of copyright law is dangerously stifling it.

To illustrate the problem, I’ll use an example that relates to the duration of copyright protection. When copyright was first made a law in 1790, it lasted 14 years from the date of creation. This was changed many times over the next 200 years, and the most recent alteration came in 1998. Now copyrighted works are protected for the author’s lifetime plus 70 years. But the term “author” is a slippery one here, because copyright law has been transformed to benefit corporations much more than any individual creators. Copyright law was instated to protect the economic rights of the creator and the fair use rights of the public (fair use says it’s okay to use copyrighted works for certain purposes). But now the vast majority of copyrighted content in the world is controlled by a handful of media conglomerates: Disney, News Corporation, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.

Many topics in the film were inspired and informed by the Creative Commons movement and Lawrence Lessig’s 2004 book Free Culture (which I covered here in July ‘08). In both that book and this documentary, Walt Disney is discussed at length. Disney himself was a sort of remixer, because many of the first animated films produced by his company were based on stories in the public domain. In other words, they were adapting stories that weren’t protected by copyright anymore or never had been protected. Think Snow White, Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella, Fantasia, and on, and on, and on. But when Walt died, the Walt Disney Corporation took a turn for the worse, and they’ve now become a force of evil in this war.

Creative Commons, on the other hand, are the foremost source of good, and over the past two years I’ve supported them however possible. One way I do that is by licensing all content on Supraterranean.com with a Creative Commons license. Like the founders say in one of the informational videos on their site, they’re laying the framework for an entirely new world culture based on sharing, collaboration, and progress.

As I left Michigan Theater when the film ended, I said to my special lady friend that it was the first time I felt proud to live in Ann Arbor (hey…give me a break…I’m a Spartan to the core). I felt surrounded by people who understood the importance of remixing, free culture, and net neutrality. It became clear that these ideas are at the core of all my work, even if I’m still figuring out how to express my thoughts and feelings. I felt a surge of emotion while watching footage of children in Brazil’s poorest neighborhoods remixing music and art, or dancing together instead of getting mixed up in gang violence. I couldn’t help but imagine what the world could be like if we continue down this brave path.

It seems like a new philosophy is shaping itself, a living philosophy that cannot be invented by any one person. Gone are the days of the dogma; we have no use for that anymore. Now there is only life — how to understand it, build upon it, make it better. Copyright law has prevented humans from being what they should: emergent and symbiotic. Our culture has become stale and rotten, but technology is setting us loose. We’re figuring out new creative ways to expend our life energy, and realizing that this is a far better option than the destruction that human history has seen thus far.

I see a future coming that will belong to no individual; instead, it will belong to all individuals. As time goes on in this new digital culture, we will all own an equal share in the past. And like Orwell wrote, “who controls the past controls the future.” Now we just need to take over the present. Lessig is working on that, too, through efforts to reform Congress and the American lawmaking process. Furthermore, most literary and philosophical genius I’ve encountered (especially surrounding Existentialism) has suggested turning attention to self-discovery, the creative struggle, and free expression. As emphasized in A Remix Manifesto, the creative process has now become more important than the finished product.

Remember this saying? “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Well, Gaylor has taken that advice literally. As announced at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, he has already twice invited other filmmakers to remix this documentary, and some of that material has been worked into the final version of A Remix Manifesto. We were reportedly the first audience to see this third cut. Gaylor also started a website called Open Source Cinema, where anyone can further remix the film. He’s hoping to build it into a platform where filmmakers can remix and collaborate using their own material. Even if you’re not ready to start remixing, you can currently view all chapters of the documentary on the site.

For more information on Creative Commons, here is an intro video from their site.

It’s time that I got into more modern publications and topics. Lawrence Lessig is a Stanford Law professor and a popular blogger. He helped found Creative Commons, which affords creators partial protection on their work in a way that will encourage further creativity and progress. He wrote a book entitled Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity, which outlines the way that our society no longer gives adequate protection to sharing, collaborating, and remixing culture. His work inspired the academic organization Students for Free Culture, a national group based at Swarthmore College that offers students a chance to make their needs heard. His ideas were even an indirect foundation for this website, and I plan to transfer most content on the site over to a Creative Commons license very soon.

Naturally, his claims are a bit scary to those who think that it’s okay for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to sue someone who downloads MP3s from a peer-to-peer network. Lessig suggests that copyright law was established to protect the creative process, and has always included the right of “Fair Use.” This means you should be allowed to use copyrighted material in a transformative way that furthers creativity and cultural growth. Lessig claims that our society favors corporate interests over individual rights. This doesn’t mean that we should steal any digital property we come across. But we have to fight to protect our freedom to interact with the culture around us.

Many of Lessig’s books are even available for free PDF download under a Creative Commons license. (What a way to convince people that you follow your own advice!) In other words, I can share, modify, or remix those books and not only avoid legal prosecution, but, as long as I credit Lessig, perhaps even get praised by the author himself. I think I’ll let Lessig explain:

“For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture” (p. 8).

“Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending on a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today” (p. 9).

“We are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law—and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been. [...] We allow it because the interests most threatened are among the most powerful players in our depressingly compromised process of making law” (p. 13).

Another presence on the rebel side of the fight is the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), who works to protect individual rights in the digital world. Of course, all of these sites (and more) are on our Links page. Is this all starting to make sense?