Rip! A Remix Manifesto (out now on DVD) is fascinating and infuriating in equal measure—at least for me, because it takes sides on an issue on which I’m divided. The documentary by Canadian “web activist” Brett Gaylor pushes the maximal view against the encroachment of intellectual property laws onto the free range of ideas and creativity. I’m all in favor of thwarting world domination by an ever-smaller number of transnational corporations, rootless conglomerates that, according to the U.S. Supreme Court, can claim patents on living organisms. And yet, the logic of Gaylor’s argument seems to lead to a world where anyone could steal anyone’s idea, composition or invention in the name of “sharing” information through person-to-person networks on the worldwide web.
Maybe one of my stumbling blocks with Rip! is Gaylor’s continual use of his “favorite” musical act, a mash-up artist calling himself Girls Talk. Essentially, Girls Talk copies and pastes existing music on his laptop, combining snippets of this and that into aural collages for CD release and public performance. Collage can be a thought-provoking art form and can also be a kindergarten class project. For me, Girls Talk is closer to the latter. Still, beyond the aesthetics of his music is the question of legality. Should a big American based music publisher (actually a single tentacle of a larger globe-grasping corporate octopus) be entitled to sue Girls Talk for sampling and recreating material under copyright? And what about the already often-underpaid musicians and writers? Is Gaylor proposing that creative people are expected to give their work away and spend the rest of their lives in cubicle jobs?
Although Gaylor sometimes paints “the past” as the enemy of progress, he is willing to play historian when it suits his arguments. True enough, copyright law as we know it is a relatively recent development. Originally, British law mandated only 14 years of protection before the copyright fell into public domain, but over the last century the U.S. took the lead in extending the life of copyrights. Is Gaylor saying he’s down with intellectual property rights so long as they are of the short duration geared toward life expectancy in the 17th century? True enough, blues songs came together from a stock of pre-copyright oral tradition, and years later Led Zeppelin lifted many blues riffs and lyrics into their songs. Gaylor neglects to mention that Zeppelin was successfully sued in several cases by the African-American songwriters whose creativity had been exploited. So Gaylor is saying that it was OK for white rock stars to steal from black songwriters?
The arguments advanced by Rip! are both dubious and thought provoking. Did the Clinton administration really scheme to export American manufacturing jobs to China with the false expectation that the Chinese would obey American copyright and patent law? If so, he should have been impeached for breach of public responsibility, not for his sexual shenanigans. At bottom, the value of Rip! is that it makes us wonder when sharing becomes theft, and where the boundaries should be drawn between the public domain and private ownership in an age when the public sphere has been under relentless assault from the ideology of the “free market.” You don’t have to fully agree with Gaylor to realize that big corporations are guilty of playing monopoly with reality.
