Rip! A Remix Manifesto!

Rip! A Remix Manifesto!

Length: 86 minutes

Summary

The documentary issues the meaning of copyright and what its main uses are. The person the documentary is focused on Girl talk, he is a mash up DJ. This means that he makes one song out of a few different songs. This is interesting because the use of different songs has to do with copyright, nowadays you can’t use another song because of copyright laws. The documentary issues the war of copyRIGHT and copyLEFT they are two parties with very different opinions about copyright, for instance copyRight is in favor of protecting the rights of the owner, the main party that is for copyRIGHT are the corporations, which is kind of obvious. The other party is copyLEFT they are in favor of publicly sharing the pieces of knowledge that is out there. The conflict that these parties have are mainly about the past and the future, Girl Talk tries to show off his music but because it is all stolen from other people they mainly focus on the justification of his music, if it is legal or not. People shouldn’t say that DJ’s are the only ones taking other ones music and making it their own also rock band take inspiration from other bands. Nowadays if someone wants to download music legally they can do this via a public domain, but this music is mainly unknown and just for advertising purposing, because people like Lady Gaga wouldn’t put their music out there for free. If people want to download in a legal way they have to pay a lot of money, which is in many peoples’ opinion a waste of money if you can get it on the internet for free. Copyright wasn’t actually meant to have this effect of laws and money problems. The reason why copyright was brought was because they wanted people to start being creative and take that creativity to make new things. But after the copyright law there the music industry took it as a way to get money out of it and use it for their advantages. For example there was a music database called Napster which distributed free music but the big corporation took this free music site to court, to stab them in the back. People that were convicted for copyright issues say that the corporations are cowards, because they see a way of making money they just start taking advantage of the situation, and the only thing they could do was illegalize downloading. When this case was taken to court they told him that it was a very nice way to download music but that this is totally illegal and only legal if used for a limited amount of time.

Nowadays there is no limit on copyright and it is hard to track who is committing the copyright crimes and it is only useful to track the ones with a huge amount of downloading. It is so hard to get these guys today because nowadays everybody uses downloading and you can’t arrest or take anyone who downloads someone to court. You could say that this new downloading is making people more creative and is starting a new culture. The main company that attacks copyright laws is Walt Disney, they want to keep everything for themselves, and so what they make is only allowed to be shown in their movies, pictures and other products. People were so used to see Mickey Mouse they started to use him as a source of creativity so they started to draw him and make him in several ways, Walt Disney attacked this idea by sewing everybody who used something very little if only it was related to Walt Disney’s ideas. The huge corporation made a new goal for themselves, they wanted to protect the originality for everything they made. Further on in the documentary they go back to Girl Talk. The family of him are concerned that some company or record company will try to take him to court or fine him, but he doesn’t care and wants to continue his hobby even though he has a risk. The new matter that is discussed is the reason why the big corporations want to take the people to court and the small companies which are also very creative don’t take the people to court, this is because the small companies let the people take their creativity and make something even better out of it. But when a big company makes something they have to protect their product just so that they can get an even higher profit, pretty pathetic, thinks the party of copyLEFT. The party of copyLEFT have a very big quarrel with the media companies. They biggest companies that own 90% of the music industry want no illegal downloading or remixing of their songs, and this is why they take their issues to court to make the government aware of their problems and therefore we should think about what our future will look like when everything has a price tag on it. The copyright criminals pay the companies when they get fined for illegal downloading, and this is strange because the artist that made the song doesn’t get paid at all, this is what also pisses of the party of copyLEFT. Sometimes the artist doesn’t even know if a court case is about their songs. Brazil is a leading party in copyright and every country should take this example here the people are free to mix and remix or mash up what they want so that they have inspiration for their creativity which they can turn into real art.