Rip Girl Talk Movie Baits Lawyers

EyeSteelFilm/NFB

Evan Dickson (CHARTattack)

03/06/2009 10:22am

You'd better go see Rip: A Remix Manifesto before it gets sued off the face of the Earth.

In the process of attacking runaway copyright law, the "Remix Manifesto" naturally puts itself into very dangerous legal territory. There's more than one scene in which somebody advises director Brett Gaylor that his documentary is basically lawsuit bait. It couldn't possibly be otherwise when its main subject is none other than mash-up king Girl Talk.

Rip is primarily dedicated to Girl Talk (known by day as biomedical engineer Gregg Gillis) and basically makes the argument that his music is just too awesome to be restricted by a bunch of stupid laws that were mostly written so Walt Disney could keep cashing in on Mickey Mouse.

When typed in actual words, that position sounds a lot like a spoiled teenager saying, "But I want it!"

But when it's told through footage of Girl Talk's fist-pumping, shirt-ripping, sweatbath live performance dance parties, the blood will rush right out of your head and you'll want to jump into the screen. The low angle, slow-motion shots of sexy girls grooving to Queen/Jackson Five makes Girl Talk look like so much fun that you wouldn't care if he had to kill a baby to make his jams.

Gaylor calculates that the total cost of all the samples Girl Talk uses on his album Feed The Animals is about $4.2 million U.S. (about $5.4 million Canadian). Even under the old American copyright rules of 1790, which allowed something into the public domain after 14 years (now it's 95 years in the U.S. after the original creator dies), that number probably wouldn't even be cut in half, since Girl Talk uses so many modern samples.

No problem. Gaylor is promoting a new system known as Creative Commons. It was invented by lawyer Lawrence Lessig and is basically a legal way for artists to give permission for other people to reproduce their work for certain uses.

Rip makes a fairly one-sided case for Creative Commons and artistic freedom and doesn't give much space to tricky details or counter arguments. This is forgivable because Rip isn't an essay, it's a manifesto. Its job is to get you pumped up about copyright reform, and it does a damn good job at that.

The movie also puts theory into practice on its website. Viewers are invited to remix scenes from the movie or create Creative Commons mash-ups for the soundtrack. Some public content was even included in the theatrical version of the film and signified by an icon. Go to opensourcecinema.com to get in on the collaboration.

Here's a trailer: